quotations about war
Weakness and ambivalence lead to war.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH
RNC acceptance speech, August 18, 1988
We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.
GERALD STANLEY LEE
The Air-line to Liberty: A Prospectus for All Nations
The nation having the strongest war footing can easily find an excuse for going to war.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.
IAN HAY
The First Hundred Thousand
Is war necessary? Can some conflicts only be solved by violence? Human history is indeed often presented as primarily a history of wars and battles, conquests and defeats. While that is only one perspective amongst many possible ones, violence of one sort or another has certainly been, if not centre-stage, at least lurking in the wings throughout the human story. Man (especially Man, but also Woman) clearly has the propensity not only to behave aggressively to other humans but also to do so in an organized way and not infrequently with calculated cruelty.
ROBERT AUBREY HINDE
War: The Bases of Institutionalized Violence
War seldom enters but where wealth allures.
JOHN DRYDEN
The Hind and the Panther
I like the War. It is only War that gives us a normal existence. What do you do in peace-time? You stay at home; you don't know what to do with your time; you argue with your parents, and your wife -- if you have one. Everyone thinks you are an insufferable egotist - and so you are. The War comes; you only go home every five or six months. You are a hero, and, what women appreciate much more, you are a change. You know stories that have never been published. You've seen strange men and terrible things. Your father, instead of telling his friends that you are embittering the end of his life, introduces you to them as an oracle. These old men consult you on foreign politics. I you are married, your wife is prettier than ever; if you are not, all the girls lay siege to you.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Silence of Colonel Bramble
The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Free, open-eyed,
We rush like bridegrooms to Death's grisly arms:
Surely the very longing for that clasp
Proves us immortal. Immortality
Alone could teach this mortal how to die.
Perhaps, war is but Heaven's great ploughshare, driven
Over the barren, fallow earthly fields,
Preparing them for harvest; rooting up
Grass, weeds, and flowers, which necessary fall,
That in these furrows the wise Husbandman
May drop celestial seed.
DINAH CRAIK
"Looking Death in the Face"
War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernisation and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable.... What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy ... when left to itself.
ERIC J. HOBSBAWM
London Observer, May 26, 1968
Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.
HENRY FORD
My Life and Work
All we've ever done is fight. Fight for freedom. Fight for justice. All we have to do is forgive.
ASHLYN RYAN
"War is bad -- why not talk out our problems?", The Altamont Enterprise, February 4, 2016
A great nation assailed by war has not only its frontiers to protect: it must also protect its good sense. It must protect itself from the hallucinations, injustices, and follies which the plague lets loose.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
preface, Above the Battle
So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.
WILLIAM JAMES
The Moral Equivalent of War
All wars of interference, arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of other states; all wars of ambition, carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement; and all wars of aggression, undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions; all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
War settles nothing.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Quote Magazine, April 4, 1965
We don't call war hell because it is fought without restraint. It is more nearly right to say that, when certain restraints are passed, the hellishness of war drives us to break with every remaining restraint in order to win. Here is the ultimate tyranny: those who resist aggression are forced to imitate, and perhaps even to exceed, the brutality of the aggressor.
MICHAEL WALZER
Just and Unjust Wars
You wouldn't believe how many I've seen coming up the road here. But precious few going back. Well, that's what war is, I believe. I always try to tell myself they're still there -- I mean, wherever it was they went -- but you know and I know there's a lot that have gone to stay.
GENE WOLFE
The Claw of the Conciliator
War is not a life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. ELIOT
A Note on War Poetry
It is not the willingness to kill on the part of our soldiers which most concerns me. That is an inherent part of war. It is our lack of respect for even the admirable characteristics of our enemy -- for courage, for suffering, for death, for his willingness to die for his beliefs, for his companies and squadrons which go forth, one after another, to annihilation against our superior training and equipment. What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts.
CHARLES LINDBERGH
journal entry, July 21, 1944