War Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Pope John Paul II

Niccolò Machiavelli

Mao Zedong

Joseph Stalin

Virginia Woolf

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Barack Obama

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

Variant translation: War is not to be avoided, but is only to be put off to the advantage of others

Niccolò Machiavelli

wars are often the cause of further wars because they fuel deep hatreds, create situations of injustice and trample upon people's dignity and rights. Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile. War is a defeat for humanity. Only in peace and through peace can respect for human dignity and its inalienable rights be guaranteed.

Pope John Paul II

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, this is only because Russia has no an army which can reach Paris in 1945.

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

May the same Almighty Goodness banish the accursed monster, war, from all lands, with her hated associates, rapine and insatiable ambition!

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Barbara W. Tuchman

To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share the guilt for the dead.

We owe a responsibility not only to those who are in Israel but also to those generations that are no more, to those millions who have died within our lifetime, to Jews all over the world, and to generations of Jews to come. We hate war. We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown, and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

Lois McMaster Bujold

Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.

John Stuart Mill

I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and that the lesson taken from this world war will be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples. I believe in Germany.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart

Everybody's at war with different things… I'm at war with my own heart sometimes.

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

Fredric Jameson

So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism — despotism during the campaign — is indispensable.

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do.