logo

Quotes About War

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.
~ Judith Butler
The inner wars, and the outer ones, go on while I pray and struggle; sometimes in the middle of a dark night of the soul I wonder how they became my wars to fight. And then I hear a voice that says, "Why not me?
~ Judy Collins
There are certain verses in the Quran which convey injunctions similar to the following: 'Kill them wherever you find them.' (2:191) Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is total untrue. Such verses relate in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. (pp. 42-43)
~ Wahiduddin Khan
The word 'jihad' has nowhere been used in the Qur'an to mean war in the sense of launching an offensive. It is used rather to mean 'struggle'. the action most consistently called for in the Qur'an is the exercise of patience. (p. 7-8)
~ Wahiduddin Khan
according to the teachings of Islam, war is to be waged not against the enemy but against the aggressor. (p. 49)
~ Wahiduddin Khan
The current anticrime debate takes place within a reified mathematical realm - a strategy reminiscent of Malthus's notion of the geometrical increase in population and the arithmetical increase in food sources, thus the inevitability of poverty and the means of suppressing it: war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.
~ Wahneema Lubiano
to this very day, Muslims do not view peace treaties in the same way that most people understand a "peace-treaty." To the Muslim mind, treaties are not binding agreements, but rather opportunities to grow stronger or buy time or to appear peaceful while preparing for war. But make no mistake, making peace treaties with the infidels simply for the sake of peace is never the ultimate goal. The only goal of Islam is victory over the whole world.
~ Walid Shoebat
Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn't understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war.
~ Wallace Stegner
One can clearly see here that Buddhism is strongly opposed to any kind of war, when it lays down that trade in arms and lethal weapons is an evil and unjust means of livelihood.
~ Walpola Rahula
Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.
~ Walt Whitman
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world;For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead.
~ Walt Whitman
The Real War Will Never Get in the Books. And so good-bye to the war.
~ Walt Whitman
Many a soldier's loving arms about this neck have cross'd and rested,Many a soldier's kiss dwells on these bearded lips.
~ Walt Whitman
So long as war is the main business of nations, temporary despotism - despotism during the campaign - is indispensable.
~ Walter Bagehot
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
~ Walter Bagehot
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
~ WALTER BENJAMIN
In our case, we live in a National Security State that is committed to perpetual war, in a consumerism that reduces everything and everyone to a commodity. As a consequence, children become statistics for sales reports, military recruitment, prison population, and debt. It is, among us, all about subordinating the future of children to the success of market ideology wherein the money and power flow to the top of the pyramid while increasing numbers of children are left behind.
~ Walter Brueggemann
we are flooded with the gifts of neighborliness—the economy of the rich devouring the poor is now inappropriate; we are now flooded with peaceable possibility—the old lust for war and violence is now out of sync; we are flooded with fruitfulness—the technological destruction that seeks to sustain our unsustainable standard of living is now passé.
~ Walter Brueggemann
The idea of all-out nuclear war is unsettling.
~ Walter Goodman
May I ask what role you envision for the Jedi in this war Two words Skywalker. None whatsoever. Luke Rodan
~ Walter Jon Williams
As always when he went abroad, Jonathan regarded the German passport officers with a degree of wistfulness. Soon he would be placing himself under foreign sovereignty, a guest; he would have to hold his tongue instead of being allowed to demonstrate his superiority. When you'd started a world war, murdered Jews and taken people's bicycles away (in Holland) the cards were stacked against you.
~ Walter Kempowski
The war, of course, furnished many examples of this pattern: the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality to which there was a violent instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.
~ Walter Lippmann
Political science has still to account for such facts as two nations attacking one another, each convinced that is is acting in self-defense, or two classes at war each certain that it speaks for the common interest. They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.
~ Walter Lippmann