-
It would be superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.—CHARLES F. ADAMS
-
This detestable [Civil] War is not of our own choosing, and out of it must grow consequences important to the welfare of coming generations, not likely to issue from a continuance of peace.—CHARLES F. ADAMS, Letter to his Son
-
You say there is neither glory nor honor to be won in civil strife. I answer, that it cannot be otherwise than right for me to fight to maintain that which my ancestors passed their whole lives in establishing.—CHARLES F. ADAMS JR., Letter to his Father
-
My voice is still for war.
Gods! can a Roman senate long debate
Which of the two to choose, slavery or death?—ADDISON, Cato
-
A rich man's war and a poor man's fight.—Anonymous
-
"It is eighteen years," I cried. "You must come no more.
We know your names. We know that you are the dead.
Must you march forever from France and the last, blind war?"
"Fool! From the next!" they said.—STEPHEN VINCENT BENET, 1936
-
There is no discharge in that war.—Bible, Ecclesiastes 8:8
-
Wars and rumours of wars.—Bible, Matthew 24:6
-
There are only two things worth fighting for. One is defense of our homes. The other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other cause is simply a racket. The trouble with America is that the dollar gets restless when it earns only 6 per cent over here. It goes overseas to get mo per cent. The flag follows the money—and the soldiers follow the flag.—GEN. SMEDLEY BUTLER
-
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.—BYRON, The Destruction of Sennacherib
-
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible development of human individuality or spontaneity; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.—CARLYLE, The French Revolution
-
Nothing can be more disgraceful than to be at war with him with whom you have lived on terms of friendship.—CICERO, De Amicitia
-
But war's a game which were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.—COWPER, The Task
-
Must there always be war? Of course it is hard to think that children are born into this world and men and women live for nothing else than to be slaughtered wholesale in a thousand ghastly ways.—CLARENCE DARROW
-
You may fire when you are ready, Gridley.—ADMIRAL DEWEY
-
War is not "inevitable," but proceeds from definite and removable causes.—G. LOWES DICKINSON, The Choice Before Us
-
All delays are dangerous in war.—DRYDEN, Tyrannic Love
-
War seldom enters but where wealth allures.—DRYDEN, The Hind & the Panther
-
Monarchs ought to put to death the authors and instigators of war, as their sworn enemies and as dangers to their states.—QUEEN ELIZABETH
-
So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.—HAVELOCK ELLIS, The Task of Social Hygiene
-
Do not men die fast enough without being destroyed by each other?—FENELON, Telemachus
-
The blood of a nation ought never to be shed except for its own preservation in the utmost extremity.—FENELON, Telemachus
-
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.—JUSTICE FRANKFURTER
-
In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace.—FRANKLIN
-
War scares are good; real wars will be better. Let there be no mistake about it. Arms dealers want war. They are hypocrites if they deny this. War is to them what milk is to a baby. They fatten on it. They fatten on it like pigs in corn.—JOHN GUNTHER, Inside Europe
-
"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."—THOMAS HARDY, The Man He Killed
-
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.—THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts
-
You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.—WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST
-
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Notes on the Next War
-
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.—PATRICK HENRY
-
As the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain but in an inclination thereto of many days together, so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.—THOMAS HOBBES, Leviathan
-
I think we shall find ourselves drifting into war with Germany.—COL. HOUSE, to Pres. Wilson, June 16, 1915
-
War is an abnormal state of society. Our intelligence should be directed toward the normal, toward peace and ways of creating and sustaining a peaceful existence.—Institute for Propaganda Analysis
-
War is the most ghastly experience that can come to any country. And always it is the people—not the handful of men in positions of power—who must pay the full price. The price in dollars and cents. The price in dismembered families. The price in heart agonies. The price in bodily suffering. The price in numbed minds. The price in precious human lives. The price in putting together the nation's pieces, afterwards. Always it is the masses who pay.—ROBERT M. LAFOLLETTE
-
Ez fur war, I call it murder,—
There you hey it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder
Than my Testyment fer that.—LOWELL, The Biglow Papers
-
A 'People's War', blazing up all over the country, will eventually prevent the victor from reaping the full fruits of his victory.—GENERAL LUDENDORFF, The Nation at War, advising on German procedure if faced with a war on two fronts
-
We want no war of conquest. . . . War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.—WILLIAM MCKINLEY
-
I should like to put asterisks here, and then write: "It was in 1919 that I found myself once again a civilian." For it makes me almost physically sick to think of that nightmare of mental and moral degradation, the war.—A. A. MILNE, Autobiography
-
The brazen throat of war.—MILTON, Paradise Lost
-
My sentence is for open war.—MILTON, Paradise Lost
-
Every war is a national calamity whether victorious or not.—GEN. VON MOLTKE
-
War hath no fury like a noncombatant.—C. E. MONTAGUE, Disenchantment
-
War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension and sets the seal of nobility on those peoples who have the courage to face it.—MUSSOLINI, Fascism
-
Three cheers for war in general!—MUSSOLINI
-
Speeches made to the people are essential to the arousing of enthusiasm for a war.—MUSSOLINI
-
I still remember the effect I produced on a small group of Galla tribesmen massed around a man in black clothes. I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.—VITTORIO MUSSOLINI, in an account of his adventures in Ethiopia.
-
War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.—THOMAS PAINE, Prospects on the Rubicon
-
Don't cheer, boys; the poor devils are dying.—CAPT. J. W. PHILIP
-
A man without one scar to show on his skin, that is smooth and sleek with ease and home-keeping habits, will undertake to define the office and duties of a general.—PLUTARCH, Lives
-
War its thousands slays,
Peace, its ten thousands.—BEILBY PORTEUS, Death
-
War makes thieves, and peace hangs them.—Proverb
-
War is death's feast.—Proverb
-
The fear of war is worse than war itself.—Proverb
-
That war is only just which is necessary.—Proverb
-
The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.—JOHN RANDOLPH
-
With supreme irony, the war to "make the world safe for democracy" ended by leaving democracy more unsafe in the world than at any time since the collapse of the revolutions of 1848.—JAMES H. ROBINSON, The Human Comedy
-
Also our present emergency and a common sense of decency make it imperative that no new group of war millionaires come into being in this nation as a result of the struggles abroad. The American people will not relish the idea of any American citizen growing rich and fat in an emergency of blood and slaughter and human suffering.—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Fireside Chat, May 26, 1940
-
(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their throats.)
Who by Christ would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?—CARL SANDBURG, Buttons
-
We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?—SENECA
-
When we, the Workers, all demand:
"What are we fighting for?" . . .
Then, then we'll end that stupid crime,
That devil's madness War.—R. W. SERVICE, Michael
-
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.—SHAKESPEARE, Henry V
-
Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.—SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
-
He is come to open
The purple testament of bleeding war.—SHAKESPEARE, Richard II
-
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front.—SHAKESPEARE, Richard III
-
Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind.—SHAW, Heartbreak House: Preface
-
If you made a poll of newspaper editors, you might find a great many who think that war is evil. But if you were to take a census among pastors of fashionable metropolitan churches.—SIMEON STRUNSKY, Professor Latimer's Progress
-
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.—GEN. SHERMAN
-
War at best is barbarism.—GEN. SHERMAN
-
War is cruel and you cannot refine it.—GEN. SHERMAN
-
Consider war. Women bear children with much pain, and raise them with loving care, and then send them out, at the very prime of their lives, to be blown to pieces by shot and shell. Other men in factories, who might be making the means of human happiness—automobiles and radio sets and books and music—these men are making explosives to wipe out whole cities, and gasses to poison the inhabitants. In the late war we destroyed 30,000,000 human beings and $300,000,000,000 worth of treasure, the produce of a whole generation of useful toil.—UPTON SINCLAIR
-
War loves to prey upon the young.—SOPHOCLES, Scyrian Women
-
War never slays a bad man in its course,
But the good always!—SOPHOCLES, Philoctetes
-
Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will clothe every man, woman and child in an attire of which kings and queens would be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to the gospel of peace.—CHARLES SUMNER
-
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.—TENNYSON, Locksley Hall
-
All great wars, involving the major nations of men, are fought for peace. They are show-downs to determine the conditions under which hundreds of millions of men are to live their peace-time lives once the war is over.—DOROTHY THOMPSON, On the Record
-
The Peloponnesus and Athens were both full of young men whose inexperience made them eager to take up arms.—THUCYDIDES, History
-
And so once more men will be made savage, fierce, and brutal, and love will wane in the world .. . And so once more the men who reaped profit from it all, will assert with assurance that since there has been a war there must needs have been one, and that other wars must follow, and they will again prepare future generations for a continuance of slaughter, depraving them from their birth.—TOLSTOY, The Coining of War
-
It is said that God is always on the side of the heaviest battalions.—VOLTAIRE
-
The real war will never get in the books.—WALT WHITMAN, Specimen Days
-
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soiled world.—WALT WHITMAN, Reconciliation
-
Away with themes of war! away with War itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight, to never more return, that show of blacken'd, mutilated corpses!
That hell unpent, and raid of blood—fit for wild tigers, or for lop-tongued wolves—not reasoning men!
And in its stead speed Industry's campaigns.
With thy undaunted armies, Engineering!
Thy pennants, Labor, loosen'd to the breeze!
Thy bugles sounding loud and clear!—WALT WHITMAN
-
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.—OSCAR WILDE, The Critic as Artist
-
Today it is the duty of all citizens of a democracy to understand this business of fighting, for a People's War is the only effective answer to Totalitarian War.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
It has happened several times in the past that a People's War has broken the most powerful military machine of the period.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
The shape of war has changed, throughout history, principally in accordance with changes in civilian methods of production and transportation.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
Faraday, the scientist, "inventing electricity," and Clausewitz, the military theorist, analysing war, were working at about the same time; Faraday's work—in its present form as the magneto and the wireless valve —has altered warfare more than the labours of Clausewitz, war's greatest scientist.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
War is not only a question of fighting; it is also a question of politics. In fact the classic definition of war, made by the greatest German military theorist, Clausewitz, is that war is a continuation of politics by other means.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
Modern war makes imposed, arbitrary and automatic discipline and rigid tactics not only useless but harmful, unsuccessful.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
Modern war makes voluntarily, understood and thinking discipline and elastic tactics based on initiative and independence, more valuable than ever before.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
There is only one thing to do about bombers. That is stay in a hole and pay attention to your business. Your business, usually, is not with them, but with men and machines on the ground. Always remember that Hitler is trying to make you afraid—or is perhaps succeeding in making you afraid—simply by making various sorts of loud noise.—TOM WINTRINGHAM, New Ways of War
-
One to destroy ig murder by the law,
And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe;
To murder thousands takes a specious name,
War's glorious art, and gives immortal fame.—EDWARD YOUNG, Love of Fame
