War Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

Bernard Mandeville

The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist

M. F. K. Fisher

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.

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented…The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.

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.

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.

Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking.

Wendell Willkie

I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.

Andrew Taylor Still

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

Henry A. Wallace

I was born in 1923 into a middle class Jewish family in Vienna, a few years after the end of World War I, which was disastrous from the Austrian point of view.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Maria Montessori

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

I was to find my cause, to hate war with a deadly loathing, to feel a murderous instinct to kill those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; to hate the pride and cowardice of these old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever — money, for instance, or war.

Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare — something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state — something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption. Man has always asked the question: what is it all about? Has life any meaning at all? He sees the enormous confusion of life, the brutalities, the revolt, the wars, the endless divisions of religion, ideology and nationality, and with a sense of deep abiding frustration he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing we call living, is there anything beyond it?

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war, but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind. In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace, where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

Wendell Phillips

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education... no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.

Abraham Flexner