Quotes About War

It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form's sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow. The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain commons sense

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war.

It's a tough thing, to know what to do about a war that deep in your gut you feel is wrong and yet watch your peers going off to fight in that war.

When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.

The Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.

The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster -- a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.

Every Senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave... This chamber reeks of blood... it does not take any courage at all for a Congressman or a Senator or a President to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Viet Nam, because it is not our blood that is being shed.

The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.

The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.