“War is not high ideals. War is not noble objectives. War is not gallant heroism. War is not sacrificial devotion.”
Must We Go to War? (1937)
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Kirby Page 248
American clergyman 1890–1957Related quotes
“The Russians have learned much in this hard war in which the Finns fought with heroism.”
Quoted in "The Winter War: The Soviet Attack on Finland" - Page 146 - by Eloise Engle, Eloise Paananen, Lauri Paananen - History - 1992
“The true objective of war is peace.”
This attributed to Sun Tzu and his book The Art of War. Actually James Clavell’s foreword in The Art of War http://www.scribd.com/doc/42222505/The-Art-Of-War states http://www.collegetermpapers.com/TermPapers/History_Other/Sun_Tzu_vs_The_Wisdom_of_the_Desert.shtml, “’the true object of war is peace.’” Therefore the quote is stated by James Clavell, but the true origin of Clavell's quotation is unclear. Nonetheless the essence of the quote, that a long war exhausts a state and therefore ultimately seeking peace is in the interest of the warring state, is true, as Sun Tzu in Chapter II Waging Wars says that "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on." This has been interpreted by Lionel Giles http://www.dutchjoens.info/SunTzu%20-%20Art%20of%20War.pdf as "Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close."
Dr. Hiroshi Hatanaka, President of Kobe College, Nishinomiya, Hyōgo, Japan is recorded as saying "the real objective of war is peace" in Pacific Stars and Stripes Ryukyu Edition, Tokyo, Japan (10 February 1949), Page 2, Column 2.
Misattributed
Source: Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers (2008), p. 250
“This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.”
Statement, sometimes dated to have been made in 1916, as quoted in Reading, Writing and Remembering : A Literary Record (1932) by Edward Verrall Lucas, p. 296
Undated
“Wars are fought to gain a certain objective.”
Interview by James Cameron, in Picture Post (28 October 1950)
Context: Wars are fought to gain a certain objective. War itself is not the objective; victory is not the objective; you fight to remove the obstruction that comes in the way of your objective. If you let victory become the end in itself then you've gone astray and forgotten what you were originally fighting about.
Employment of Naval Forces (1948)
Context: The basic objectives and principles of war do not change.
The final objective in war is the destruction of the enemy's capacity and will to fight, and thereby force him to accept the imposition of the victor's will. This submission has been accomplished in the past by pressure in and from each of the elements of land and sea, and during World War I and II, in and from the air as well. The optimum of pressure is exerted through that absolute control obtained by actual physical occupation. This optimum is obtainable only on land where physical occupation can be consolidated and maintained.
As quoted in the Washington Post (27 May 1967)
