War Quotes

"Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world."

"If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?"

"Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week."

"War, I thought, was the most negative aspect of male heterosexuality. If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men."

"In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense."

"War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle."

"War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory."

"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war."

"She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven."

"Without perestroika, the cold war simply would not have ended. But the world could not continue developing as it had, with the stark menace of nuclear war ever present."

"War is a defeat for humanity."

"More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars - yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments."

"I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat."

"Of course, I also attribute some of my hearing loss to being in the infantry in World War II. It's probably a combination of heredity and noise exposure."

"There's a tendency on the part of Americans, all of us, to say, 'Hey, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, we don't have to worry about these guys again.' We always have to be worried about them, we always have to be concerned about them, and we have to be well-informed."

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

"Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military."

"The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting."

"A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster."

"Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq."

"I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war."

"In 'The Hunger Games,' in most people's idea, in terms of rebellion or a civil-war situation, that would meet the criteria for a necessary war. These people are oppressed, their children are being taken off and put in gladiator games. They're impoverished, they're starving, they're brutalized."

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

"Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America."

"Where I lived in Glasgow looked like Dresden after the war. It was a bomb site. I don't think I'd ever played football on grass until I moved to Australia."

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

"Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed."

"War does not determine who is right - only who is left."

"The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance."

"The most important accomplishment, I believe, was my voting against the First World War."

"War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest."

"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."

"For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it."

"In a war, you must hate somebody or love somebody; you must have a position or you cannot stand what goes on."

"No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons."

"The use of drones is rapidly transforming the way we go to war. On the battlefield, a squad leader can receive real-time data from a drone that enables him to view the landscape for miles in every direction, dramatically expanding the capabilities of what would normally have been a small and isolated unit."

"When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war."

"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."

"Each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It's always the same story repeating once and again and again."

"War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America."

"Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war - for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more."

"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master."

"With all the negativity going on in the world right now, people need an escape. When you give them a hit record or a great record, it allows them to escape for at least three to four minutes. They're not thinking bills or economy or immigration or war when you create that kind of ambiance."

"Bush's war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties."

"Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war."

"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast."

"Every action is seen to fall into one of three main categories, guarding, hitting, or moving. Here, then, are the elements of combat, whether in war or pugilism."

"War is like love; it always finds a way."

"What we can afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be and, by doing so, introduce into our defense vulnerabilities based on self-delusion."

"I was in World War Two at the battle of Okinawa."