Quotes About War

It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures.

On the eve of each war at least one of the nations miscalculated its bargaining power. In that sense every war comes from a misunderstanding. And in that sense every war is an accident.

The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question — did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill — will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century.

If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.

The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?

War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force.

No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.

Wars end when nations agree that war is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute; wars begin when nations agree that peaceful diplomacy is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute. Agreement is the essence of the transition from peace to war and from war to peace, for those are merely alternating phases of a relationship between nations.

Whether we like the idea or not, war has again and again been seen as the great auditor, the special testing time, of a nation's strength and fibre.

Why did nations turn so often to war in the belief that it was a sharp and quick instrument for shaping international affairs when again and again the instrument had proved to be blunt or unpredictable? This recurring optimism is a vital prelude to war. Anything which increases the optimism is a cause of war. Anything which dampens that optimism is a cause of peace.

Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory.

Americans have been slaughtering one another in record numbers, in what can only be called America's secret war against itself.

We may be facing a generation of struggle to defend liberal democracy and human rights from authoritarian nationalism. There is a danger of a contraction of world trade and even of a major war. These threats make action more urgent. The Left is better equipped to win this struggle, as long as it understands and avoids the errors of its past.

More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front.

And while he protested that he was more than just a soldier, Churchill recognised in himself an obsession with war, along with a contradictory fear of that obsession. 'Much as war attracts me,' he had written to Clementine from the German army manoeuvres in 1909, '& fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year … what vile & wicked folly and barbarism it is

Churchill had always had a strong sense of personal destiny: 'Why have I always been kept safe within a hair's breadth of death, except to do something like this?' Now he felt that more than ever that, even if war was folly and barbarism, it was his fulfilment – and opportunity.

Peace to the shacks! War on the palaces!

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

The United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam war is over—that we have "won" in the sense that our Armed Forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam.

You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.

All quiet along the Potomac.

When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

Nothing ever is done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

[On World War II:] We could not indulge in a Seven Years War. A king can perhaps do that, but you cannot have such a protracted struggle in a democracy in the face of mounting casualties.