Quotes About War

Behavior that Christians would never support in any other context suddenly becomes perfectly acceptable, even praiseworthy, simply because the state has declared that a war is under way. (That's what Voltaire meant when he said, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.")

No one forces you to buy a Twinkie. But governments do force you to fight in their wars and pay for their bailouts.

The war was fought to prevent the secession, not to free the slaves. People who took up arms in the South did so because they were being invaded.

We're being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live.

If you want to stop the war machine, you'll have to go after the money machine.

By what right did we lure children to their deaths, caught by a glint of light on metal, a trumpery banner?

I have the greatest respect for General Buonaparte, as every soldier must. But he will make out of Egypt a catastrophe for France. The Revolution has but one enemy, England. And the place to strike England is close to her home.

But it is a class war in which, as David Brooks puts it, there is "no class resentment or class consciousness." The paradox—a class divide in which class doesn't matter—is repeated virtually without fail through the "two Americas" literature

Money is the sinew of love as well as war.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!You shoot a fellow downYou'd treat if met where any bar is,Or help to half-a-crown.

Nobody heard of Vietnam until there was a war," Ali once proclaimed. "Nobody heard of Korea until there was a war. Nobody heard of Zaire until I fought there, and paying me is a whole lot cheaper than fighting a war."9

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

For it can never be that war shall preserve life, and peace destroy it.

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

I have seen enough of one war never to wish to see another.

It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.

We must therefore… hold them [the British] as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

Whensoever hostile aggressions… require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.

I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force? Are there no means of coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of millions of our fellow creatures?

I have the consolation to reflect that during the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single fellow citizen was shed by the sword of war or of the law.

My views and feelings (are) in favor of the abolition of war--and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.

Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. "He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.