
“What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”
Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971
Amalgamation of Carl Sandburg's quote "Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come" with a sentence from Brecht's Koloman Wallisch Kantate: "When the people are disarmed / War will come" ("Wenn das Volk entwaffnet ist / Kommt der Krieg"). - Source http://www.cyberussr.com/hcunn/q-war-nobody-came.html
Misattributed
“What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”
Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971
1860s, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
Context: On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it — all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
“War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer.”
Source: Behrooz Wolf (aka The Proteus Trilogy), Proteus Unbound (1989), Chapter 14 (p. 330)
“You see, this war came to us, not the other way around.”
Remarks at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Iraq http://usinfo.state.gov/usinfo/Archive/2005/May/16-275013.html, May 15, 2005.
Interview with the Washington, D.C. Evening Star (12 March 1889)
1890s
The Human Comedy (1943)
Context: Everything is changed — for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War.
“I have much to teach you. Come and learn the art of war from the one who invented it. (Takeshi)”
Source: Acheron
“I am she who gave you so much war and completed my day before evening.”
I' so' colei che ti die' tanta guerra,
et compie' mia giornata inanzi sera.
Canzone 302, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death