War Quotes

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.
– Neville Chamberlain
We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.
– Neville Chamberlain
There is no morality in war. Morality is the privilege of those judging from the distance. War is only death and destruction.
– John Cory
I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.
– Sheryl Crow
There was never a war on poverty. Maybe there was a skirmish on poverty.
– Andrew Cuomo
Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
– Salvador Dali
Every day it becomes clearer that this was the wrong war at the wrong time.
– Howard Dean
War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.
– Benjamin Disraeli
Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace, let us mobilize the potentialities, particularly the moral and spiritual potentialities, which we usually reserve for war.
– John Foster Dulles
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
– John Foster Dulles
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
– Umberto Eco
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
– Thomas A. Edison
I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
– Albert Einstein
I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.
– Albert Einstein
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
– Albert Einstein
It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
– Albert Einstein
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
– Albert Einstein
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
– Albert Einstein
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
– Loren Eiseley
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
In most communities it is illegal to cry fire in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
War settles nothing.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.
– Larry Elder
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
– Henry Ellis
The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
– Desiderius Erasmus
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.
– Euripides
There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
– Benjamin Franklin
Either war is obsolete, or men are.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
War is the ultimate tool of politics.
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?
– Oriana Fallaci
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
– Francois Fenelon
You don't have to have fought in a war to love peace.
– Geraldine A. Ferraro
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
– David Friedman
War remains the decisive human failure.
– John Kenneth Galbraith
If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
– Mahatma Gandhi
Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.
– Newt Gingrich
I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.
– Barry M. Goldwater
If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.
– Ulysses S. Grant
Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.
– Graham Greene
Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present. He that has no children brings them up well.
– Germaine Greer
I am an opponent of Saddam Hussein, but an opponent also, of the sanctions that have killed a million Iraqi children and an opponent of the United States' apparent desire to plunge the Middle East into a new and devastating war.
– George Galloway
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
– Thomas Hardy
On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction.
– Stephen Harper
Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.
– B. H. Liddell Hart
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
– Ernest Hemingway
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
– Ernest Hemingway
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
– Ernest Hemingway
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
– Ernest Hemingway
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
Four years of world war, at a cost in human suffering which our minds are mercifully too limited to imagine, led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.
– Arthur Henderson
He would see civilization in danger of perishing under the oppression of a gigantic paradox: he would see multitudes of people starving in the midst of plenty, and nations preparing for war although pledged to peace.
– Arthur Henderson
In almost every country there are elements of opinion which would welcome such a conclusion because they wish to return to the politics of the balance of power, unrestricted and unregulated armaments, international anarchy, and preparation for war.
– Arthur Henderson
In our modern world of interdependent nations, hardly any state can wage war successfully without raising loans and buying war materials of every kind in the markets of other nations.
– Arthur Henderson
In short, it may be said that on paper the obligations to settle international disputes peacefully are now so comprehensive and far-reaching that it is almost impossible for a state to resort to war without violating one or more solemn treaty obligations.
– Arthur Henderson
In some states militant nationalism has gone to the lengths of dictatorship, the cult of the absolute or totalitarian state and the glorification of war.
– Arthur Henderson
It is because I believe that it is in the power of such nations to lead the world back into the paths of peace that I propose to devote myself to explaining what, in my opinion, can and should be done to banish the fear of war that hangs so heavily over the world.
– Arthur Henderson
Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.
– Arthur Henderson
The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.
– Arthur Henderson
The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity.
– Arthur Henderson
We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.
– Arthur Henderson
War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
– George Herbert
In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
– Herodotus
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.
– Napoleon Hill
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
– Thomas Hobbes
War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.
– Thomas Hobbes
Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them.
– Abbie Hoffman
It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.
– Herbert Hoover
When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.
– Herbert Hoover
A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.
– Edgar Watson Howe
Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments to unveil.
– Kin Hubbard
The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully.
– Charles Evans Hughes
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
– Victor Hugo
Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.
– Victor Hugo
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
– Aldous Huxley
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
– Aldous Huxley
Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized men.
– King Hussein
My point was that the war was intrinsically wrong, and as a result of our participation we haven't improved Australia's security but created a greater danger at home and abroad.
– Bob Hawke
War is hell, and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.
– Ian Hay
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
– Washington Irving
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
– Hiram Johnson
Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'
– Immanuel Kant
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!
– Helen Keller
It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.
– John F. Kennedy
Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.
– John F. Kennedy
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
– John F. Kennedy
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
– John F. Kennedy
We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.
– John F. Kennedy
Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.
– Ellen Key
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.
– John Maynard Keynes
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the postive affirmation of peace.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.