War Quotes

"Our soldiers fought in the Korean War to push back communism. As a result of their effort and the effort of our allies, South Korea is free today."

"All oppression creates a state of war."

"The Secretary of Hygiene or Physical Culture will be far more important in the cabinet of the President of the United States who holds office in the year 2035 than the Secretary of War."

"War is a blessing compared with national degradation."

"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."

"A war is justified if you're willing to send your son. If you're not willing to send your son, then how do you send someone else's?"

"So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier."

"I do not think that war is always wrong: sometimes it is necessary to stop a dictator, prevent massive human-rights abuses, or expel an invader. But I have also seen that in the modern world, civil wars are the greatest threat to humanitarian security."

"After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews."

"Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move."

"War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."

"Before the Civil War, Canada was at the top of the underground railroad. If you made it into Canada, you were safe unless someone came and hauled you back. That was also true during the Vietnam War for draft resisters."

"People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work."

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."

"The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture."

"This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."

"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."

"A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him."

"Laws are silent in time of war."

"People are still thinking of solving problems by violence and war, and that has to stop."

"The increased consumption of alcoholic beverages in Canada since the outbreak of war is one evidence of this."

"War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter."

"Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week."

"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

"Moreover, broad plans commensurate with our national purpose and resources would bring conviction of our power to every soldier in the front line, to the nations associated with us in the war, and to the enemy."

"I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life."

"The war on terror is a fight that we did not start, but it is one that we shall finish."

"It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war."

"The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky."

"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it."

"Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?"

"Only the dead have seen the end of the war."

"I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go... It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, 'Wait a second? Didn't we just get through with that?'"

"The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars."

"Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war."

"The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt."

"This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief."

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

"For what can war, but endless war, still breed?"

"If we lose the war in the air we lose the war and we lose it quickly."

"Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory."

"In 2013, I had to do 'The Wright Stuff' on about an hour's sleep. I was asked, 'What do you make of the situation in Mali?' and I said, 'Well, I've not seen the film but I know the dog dies in the end.' They were talking about the civil war, and the whole audience took an inward breath. I thought, 'Should I not have revealed the end of the film?'"

"It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering."

"What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war."

"Joe Biden has supported sending Americans to die in wars for 50 years, including the never-ending Iraq War."

"Why should Iran have a deterrent strategy? Well, it's surrounded by hostile enemies. Both of its borders have been under occupation by a hostile superpower, the United States, which is constantly violating the U.N. charter by leaving open what they call the saying, 'all options are open' - meaning the threat of war."

"Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil."

"War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known."

"I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell."

"What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world, and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by any supposed national interest."