“Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore. (p. 189)
Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
“An organism at war with itself is doomed.”
Variant: Now, if you two will excuse us, we'll get back to the relatively simple buisness of planning a war," he said.
-Baron Arald
Source: The Burning Bridge
Source: Belgarath the Sorcerer
“I learned to play the instruments of war," he said, "and paint in blood.”
Source: City of Lost Souls
“In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes.”
Thom Merrilin
(15 January 1990)
Source: To the Blight
Source: Tatiana and Alexander
Variant: If Joan of Arc could turn the tide of an entire war before her eighteenth birthday, you can get out of bed.
“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.”
“War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.”
"War Is God's Way of Teaching Us Geography" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/19/geography/ at Quote Investigator
"The comment 'War is God's way of teaching Americans geography,' is continually attributed to Ambrose Bierce. Biographer David E. Schultz, who has nearly all of Bierce's writing entered on his computer, cannot find this acerbic remark within that database." Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier (2007), p. 240
Misattributed
Stand-up performance at RIT (2005)
“War and hunting and chasing-that's all there is. That's life, Jenny-no one can escape it.”
Source: The Chase
“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”
Source: Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace ... One School at a Time
Letter to James E. Yeatman of St. Louis, Vice-President of the Western Sanitary Commission (21 May 1865). As quoted on p. 358, and footnoted on p. 562, in Sherman: A Soldier's Passion For Order https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/080938762X (2007), John F. Marszalek, Southern Illinois University Press, Chapter 15 ('Fame Tarnished')
Variant text: I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers […] it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated […] that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. […] I declare before God, as a man and a soldier, I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed and submissive before me, but would rather say—‘Go, and sin no more.’
As quoted in Sherman: Merchant of Terror, Advocate of Peace https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/1455611891 (1992), Charles Edmund Vetter, Pelican Publishing, p. 289
See the Discussion Page for more extensive sourcing information.
1860s, 1865, Letter to James E. Yeatman (May 1865)
Context: I confess without shame that I am tired & sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies […] It is only those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrills & groans of the wounded & lacerated (friend or foe) that cry aloud for more blood & more vengeance, more desolation & so help me God as a man & soldier I will not strike a foe who stands unarmed & submissive before me but will say ‘Go sin no more.
Letter to papal nuncio Count Dugnani (14 February 1818)
1810s
“I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.”
Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”
Source: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
Birds (414 BC)
Context: Epops: You're mistaken: men of sense often learn from their enemies. Prudence is the best safeguard. This principle cannot be learned from a friend, but an enemy extorts it immediately. It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war. And this lesson saves their children, their homes, and their properties.
Chorus [leader]: It appears then that it will be better for us to hear what they have to say first; for one may learn something at times even from one's enemies.
(tr. Anon. 1812 rev. in Ramage 1864, p. 45 http://books.google.com/books?id=AoUCAAAAQAAJ&pg;=PA45)
Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
“Wow. When he started looking back on the war with Kronos as the good old days--that was sad.”
Source: The House of Hades
Source: The Mark of Athena
Source: Mr. Perfect
“The real war will never get in the books.”
Source: Lover Unleashed
Shown at the end of the episode "Scorched Earth", no. 14 in the 3rd season of Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict, first aired on February 7, 2000.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country. ~ Horace in Odes, Book 3, Ode 2, Line 13, as translated in The Works of Horace by J. C. Elgood
Notes on the Next War (1935)
“Let others wage war. You, lucky Austria, shall marry.”
Source: Goliath
“War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war”
Source: The Lowland
“I am a hundred and forty six years old and this is not my first unwinnable war.”
Source: City of Heavenly Fire
“In war-time,’ I said, ‘truth is so precious she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Discussion of Operation Overlord with Stalin at the Teheran Conference (November 30, 1943); in The Second World War, Volume V : Closing the Ring (1952), Chapter 21 (Teheran: The Crux), p. 338.
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Variant: In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
“War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.”
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
Source: A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
17 min 40 sec
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]
Interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173
Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, 72 (6), June 1948, p. 9 http://books.google.com/books?id=0UMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA9: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex Johnson http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7406337/, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as discussed at Quote Investigator : "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown, But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/16/future-weapons/#more-679. The earliest found was from “Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, Col. 3. In this article Winchell wrote: <blockquote> Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war. “I dunno,” he said, “but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll be using spears!” </blockquote>
: It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere.
1940s
Variant: I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
Source: War and Peace
“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.”
TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html (March 2008).
Source: Tatiana and Alexander
Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”
Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971
Source: The Forever War
