Quotes About War

Athens's disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens's preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America's dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

To assert that military history suggested that wars broke out because bad men, in fear or in pride, sought material advantage or status, or because sometimes good but naive men had done too little to deter them, was understandably seen as antithetical to a more enlightened understanding of human nature.

Democratic citizenship requires knowledge of war—and now, in the age of weapons of mass annihilation, more than ever.

Second, they believe that when the Marines go to war they invariably turn in a performance that is dramatically and decisively successful—not most of the time, but always.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

I never ignore the phone because it could be a war breaking out or an earthquake.

If war has its chivalry and its pageantry, it has also its hideousness and its demoniac woe. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek.

Look not thou on beauty's charming; Sit thou still when kings are arming; Taste not when the wine-cup glistens; Speak not when the people listens

The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.

I could not imagine that we should make much of an effort to preserve remainders of natural beauty in conquered Poland.

I think war is based in greed and there are huge karmic retributions that will follow. I think war is never the answer to solving any problems. The best way to solve problems is to not have enemies.

Although our war on drugs must be fortified with the best laws, enforcement efforts and resources, we would not be successful without your individual commitment to this cause.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don't think you do. It's just business.

I liked books - the respite and privacy of them - books about plants and the formation of ice and the business of world wars. Whenever I sank into them I felt free.

I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

As Bill Clinton said so eloquently at the convention, during Vietnam there was a chance to serve; there was a chance not to serve.

Everyday we could think about the aggression in the world. In New York, Los Angelos, Halifax, Taiwain, Beiruit, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq. Everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy. And the pain escalates forever. Everyday we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, Am I going to add to the aggression in the world? Everyday, at the moment when things get edgy, we could just ask ourselves, Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?

When the rivers and air are polluted, when families and nations are at war, when homeless wanderers fill the highways, these are traditional signs of a dark age. Another is that people become poisoned by self-doubt and become cowards.