Quotes about war

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“In times of war, the law falls silent.”

“All oppression creates a state of war”

“Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.”

“Mankind must put an end to war - or war will put an end to mankind.”

“My point is not that religion itself is the motivation for wars, murders and terrorist attacks, but that religion is the principal label, and the most dangerous one, by which a 'they' as opposed to a 'we' can be identified at all.”

“In war, good guys always become bad guys.”

“Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.”

“They won the war but lost the peace”

“To the people who are upset about their hard-earned tax money going to things they don’t like: welcome to the f*cking club. Reimburse me for the Iraq war and oil subsidies, and diaphragms are on me!”

“You don't avoid such a war, you merely postpone it, to your own disadvantage.”

“Here is a list of fearful things:
The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings,
The rabid bite of the dog's of war,
The voice of one who went before.
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
which counts us out our numbered days.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

“Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left but charred smithereens.”

“I didn't know that, you take your coffee seriously, dont you?'
'Every morning, I run to the coffeemaker like a soldier returning to a lost love after the war.”

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”

“They say we have we created the man to end all wars; I say we have created a man to end all worlds.”

“Wage war on death. Live for love.”

“The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.”

“You see, a conflict always begins with an issue - a difference of opinion, an argument. But by the time it turns into a war, the issue doesn't matter anymore, because now it's about one thing and one thing only: how much each side hates the other.”

“A Time For Prayer

"In times of war and not before,
God and the soldier we adore.
But in times of peace and all things righted,
God is forgotten and the soldier slighted."

-Rudyard Kipling”

“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children. War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.”

“Peace is not merely the absence of war but the presence of justice, of law, of order —in short, of government.”

“The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.”

“For war there is always enough. It's peace that's expensive.”

“All war presupposes human weakness and seeks to exploit it.”

“I don't know who the good guys are anymore. But I do know what the enemy is. It's the compromise of principles. You lose the war when you lose your principles. And the first principle is to look out for your comrades.”

“How come we play war and not peace?"
"Too few role models.”

“August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.”

“It is easier to start a war than to end it.”

“Tis a well-known fact that a man is either skilled in matters of loving or matters of war. ’Tis obvious that fighting is your skill.”

“The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.”

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

“Beware
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease”

“War is not nice.”

“Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.”

“When Winston Churchill was asked to cut arts funding in favour of the war effort, he simply asked,'then what are we fighting for?”

“I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heart-less robots who protect them and their property.”

“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”

“How ironic is it to see a bumper sticker that says 'Jesus is the answer' next to a bumper sticker supporting the war in Iraq, as if to says 'Jesus is the answer - but not in the real world.”

“War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.”

“Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.”

“We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.”

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

“You must learn to end the wars in your world by ending them in your minds.”

“Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.”

“Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.”

“Wars are often waged not because of what we believe, but because of the things we want others to believe.”

“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”

“This massive ascendancy of corporate power over democratic process is probably the most ominous development since the end of World War II, and for the most part "the free world" seems to be regarding it as merely normal.”

“Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.”

“There is nothing like a War for the reinvention of lives…”

“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.”

“One bachelor is an irritation. Ten thousand bachelors are a war.”

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”

“When the rich make war, it's the poor that die.”

“When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.”

“War is far worse. At least where politics is going on, there are
usually nice hors d’oeuvres.”

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

“Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

“The poor go to war, to fight and die for the delights, riches, and superfluities of others.”

“Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.”

“War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.”

“Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.”

“The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history—the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen”

“If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.”

“War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs. It poisons the soul.”

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

“Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.”

“Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.”

“We've finally given liberals a war against fundamentalism, and they don't want to fight it. They would, except it would put them on the same side as the United States.”

“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”

“Can you ever "solve" poverty? Can you ever "solve" crime? Can you ever "solve" disease, unemployment, war, or any other societal herpes? Hell no.”

“The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”

“Ceres wanted a united front in the plant war."
"The plant war," Percy said. "You're going to arm all the little grapes with tiny assault rifles?”

“Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?"
They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us.”

“nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. it’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it.”

“Time is more precious than gold, more precious than diamonds, more precious than oil or any valuable treasures. It is time that we do not have enough of; it is time that causes the war within our hearts, and so we must spend it wisely.”

“Roman might have survived the Great Vampire War of 1710, but he was about to face an even worse terror.
A mortal female in full rage.”

“In war everyone loses. This brutal truth can be seen in the eyes of every solider in every world.”

“You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.”

“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“This is not a war, this is a test of how far man can be degraded”

“One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”

“Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”

“Even without wars, life is dangerous.”

“Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.”

“Fear can’t be reasoned with. Neither can hate. They’re like love. They’re almost identical emotions. That’s why Ares and Aphrodite like each other. Their twin sons – Fear and Panic – were spawned from both war and love.”

“The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold…The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes.”

“Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.)”

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....”

“It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.”

“If he waits for the ideal moment, he will never set off; he requires a touch of madness to take the next step. The warrior uses that touch of madness. For - in both love and war - it is impossible to foresee everything.”

“Intelligence won wars, not brute force.”

“Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a "war against terrorism."”

“Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.”

“Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.”

“Preventing war is much better than protesting against the war. Protesting the war is too late.”

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.”

“Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death.”