Quotes About History

If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

I grew up in the time of Germany after the war.

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

History offers examples of winning in diplomacy after losing in war.

The terror created by weaponry has never stopped men from employing them.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans.

Between 1861 and 1865, Americans made war on each other and killed each other in great numbers - if only to become the kind of country that could no longer conceive of how that was possible.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man?

At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

Accurst be he that first invented war.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

We want to keep the actual Civil War experience alive.

As General Eisenhower discovered, it is easier to end the Cold War or stamp out poverty than to master this devilish pastime.

Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.

If we added up the killed and wounded from the Democrat wars in this country, it would be about 1.6 million Americans.

We Germans carried our hatred from the First World War to the Second World War, and now you are about to carry the hatred about the murder of 5 million people on to another World War.

I know better than to get in between three women arguing. If you'll remember, the whole Trojan War started over that. (Wulf)

Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.

We have always been a nation different from the Chinese. Long ago we fought wars with them.