War Quotes

I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.
– George McGovern
I did a production of 'Journey's End,' an RC Sherriff play about World War I, at the Edinburgh Festival. I was 18 and it was the first time that people I knew and loved and respected came up to me after the show and said, 'You know, you could really do this if you wanted to.'
– Tom Hiddleston
I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.
– Larry David
I consider Bush's decision to call for a war against terrorism a serious mistake. He is elevating these criminals to the status of war enemies, and one cannot lead a war against a network if the term war is to retain any definite meaning.
– Jurgen Habermas
I can't go to war with paparazzi.
– Daniel Craig
I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.
– Charles Schumer
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.
– P. D. James
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
– William Tecumseh Sherman
I am still profoundly troubled by the war in Nicaragua. The United States launched a covert war against another nation in violation of international law, a war that was wrong and immoral.
– Bianca Jagger
I am against all war.
– Sophia Loren
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
– Thomas Jefferson
Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn't care. This is war - not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that's a victory he savors and desires - unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.
– John Podhoretz
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
– Karl Kraus
How do you tell troops who volunteered to fight for our freedoms that the country they fought for won't take care of them when they come back? In the time of war our troops and their families are supposed to be our number one priority.
– John Salazar
Here we will solve with laws and dollars, problems that too many people around the world still must solve with violence and civil war.
– Marco Rubio
Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either.
– Jon Meacham
Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.
– George Galloway
Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.
– Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
God has been pleased to save us during the years of war that have already passed. We pray that He may be pleased to save us to the end. But we must do our part.
– Eamon de Valera
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we're engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there.
– Dick Cheney
France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.
– Charles de Gaulle
Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead.
– Barack Obama
For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.
– Steven Spielberg
For far too long we've allowed the other side to paint us as racist, as sexist, inhumane war mongers - well, today as a conservative black Republican and former solider, I'm here to set that record straight.
– Allen West
For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.
– Robert Capa
First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.
– Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
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
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
– Elizabeth Bowen
Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.
– Denzel Washington
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
– William Tecumseh Sherman
Even under the best of circumstances, the road back from war is difficult.
– Ron Wyden
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.
– Wendell Willkie
During the Cold War, we were interested because we were scared that Russia and the United States were going to go to war. We were scared that Russia was going to take over the world. Every country became a battleground.
– Fareed Zakaria
During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.
– John le Carre
Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.
– Samuel Goldwyn
Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.
– Allan Massie
Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.
– Sarah Palin
Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.
– Jack Kemp
Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
– Karl Rove
Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.
– Ron Paul
Circumstances cause us to act the way we do. We should always bear this in mind before judging the actions of others. I realized this from the start during World War II.
– Thor Heyerdahl
But when will our leaders learn - war is not the answer.
– Helen Thomas
But the war on terror as I have repeatedly said in the past, and the Afghan people believe in it, in truth, is that the war on terror is not in the Afghan villages or homes. Its in the sanctuaries, it is in the training grounds, its in the motivation factors and the money that comes to it.
– Hamid Karzai
But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.
– Jane Goodall
But do I think that our actions in anyway violate the War Powers Resolution, the answer is no.
– Barack Obama
Bush's war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.
– George Soros
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
– J. B. Priestley
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
– Thomas Sowell
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
– Toni Morrison
Berlin is still going through a transition since the Cold War - both in what used to be East and West Berlin. I can still sense the confusion and the struggle for identity there in the streets. There's a pulse to it.
– Diane Kruger
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
– St. Jerome
Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.
– Thucydides
Bad things do happen in the world, like war, natural disasters, disease. But out of those situations always arise stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
– Daryn Kagan
Australians are coffee snobs. An influx of Italian immigrants after World War II ensured that - we probably had the word 'cappuccino' about 20 years before America. Cafe culture is really big for Aussies. We like to work hard, but we take our leisure time seriously.
– Hugh Jackman
As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a 'Near Great' even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.
– Thomas Frank
As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.
– Lester B. Pearson
As a result of my philosophy, I wasn't even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn't hate him. I hated what he was doing.
– Albert Ellis
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
– Otto von Bismarck
Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.
– Ron Paul
And, of course, in the Philippines there were so many thousands of Americans that were captured by the Japanese and held and who were rescued by Filipino Americans, or Filipinos I should say, and by U.S. troops near the close of the war.
– Dana Rohrabacher
And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede.
– Dick Gregory
And if there was one title that could be applied to all my films, it would be 'Civil War' - not civil war in the way we know it, but the daily war that goes on between us all.
– Michael Haneke
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
– Shelby Foote
An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.
– Charles de Montesquieu
American credibility in the war on terrorism depends on a strong stand against all terrorist acts, whether committed by foe or friend.
– Arlen Specter
America's veterans and troops serving abroad today fought hard to preserve our red, white and blue, from the Revolutionary War to today's Global War Against Terrorism, and Congress' action today is appropriate for one of our most sacred symbols.
– Bill Shuster
All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.
– George Wald
All the culture war issues will be settled by the court.
– Gary Bauer
After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war.
– Barney Ross
After every war someone has to tidy up.
– Wislawa Szymborska
After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.
– Leon Panetta
Accurst be he that first invented war.
– Christopher Marlowe
Accursed be he that first invented war.
– Christopher Marlowe
A war between Europeans is a civil war.
– Victor Hugo
A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.
– Camille Paglia
A state of war is not a blank check... when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.
– Sandra Day O'Connor
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.
– Carly Simon
A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.
– Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf
A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.
– Rita Rudner
A majority of this country opposes this war, a majority of this country never voted for this administration.
– Michael Moore
A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.
– Christopher Hitchens
A devastating commentary on the war in Iraq is that we have been unable to spend money on infrastructure.
– Charles Schumer