Quotes About War

There never was a good war or a bad peace.  ~ Benjamin Franklin


You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.  ~ Albert Einstein


War does not decide who is right but who is left.  ~ George Bernard Shaw


War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.  ~ Georges Clemenceau


All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.  ~ John Steinbeck


It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement.  ~ Henry Ward Beecher


The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.  ~ George Patton


Either war is obsolete, or men are.  ~ Buckminster Fuller


Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. ~ George Carlin


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


Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.  ~ Ernest Hemingway


In time of war the first casualty is truth.  ~ Boake Carter


Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.  ~ George S. Patton Jr.


A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.  ~ Napoleon


It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.  ~ Voltaire


How is it possible to have a civil war?  ~ George Carlin


The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.  ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.  ~ Henry Kissinger


We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.  ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


Only the dead have seen the end of war.  ~ Plato


We make war that we may live in peace.  ~ Aristotle


A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if it does not lose.  ~ Henry Kissinger


In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.  ~ Stanislaw J. Lec


Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.


The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.  ~ John F. Kennedy


I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.  ~ Ulysses S. Grant


All wars are popular for the first 30 days.  ~ Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.


War creates peace like hate creates love.  ~ David L. Wilson


How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy!  ~ Friedrich Nietzsche


Older men declare war.  But it is the youth that must fight and die.  ~ Herbert Hoover


Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men.  ~ Susan Glaspell


Everything you do in a war is crime in peace.  ~ Helen McCloy


Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.  ~ Donald Rumsfeld


The only way to win a war is to prevent it.  ~ George Marshall


It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.  ~ General Douglas MacArthur


A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.  ~ Aldous Huxley


It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.  ~ Voltaire


Occasionally the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants.  ~ Thomas Jefferson


You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.  ~ Helen Thomas


War is the business of barbarians.  ~ Napoleon Bonaparte


The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.  ~ Martin Luther King Jr.


There will be no veterans of World War III.  ~ Walter Mondale


I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.  ~ Albert Einstein


The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.  ~ George Orwell


Morale is the greatest single factor in successful wars.  ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower


There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.  ~ Havelock Ellis


In war there is no substitute for victory.  ~ General Douglas MacArthur


Morality is contraband in war.  ~ Mahatma Gandhi


When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.  ~ Jean-Paul Sartre


War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.  ~ Winston Churchill


War is the unfolding of miscalculations.  ~ Barbara Tuchman


The object of war is to survive it.  ~ John Irving


Governments constantly choose between telling lies and fighting wars, with the end result always being the same. One will always lead to the other.  ~ Thomas Jefferson


The first casualty when war comes is truth.  ~ Hiram Johnson


In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.  ~ Herodotus


Vice stirs up war; virtue fights.  ~ Vauvenargues


In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.  ~ H.L. Mencken


You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.  ~ Jeannette Rankin


There is nothing certain about war except that one side won't win.  ~ Sir Ian Hamilton


Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?  ~ Eleanor Roosevelt


What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?  ~ Mahatma Gandhi


Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.  ~ Maria Montessori


War is what happens when language fails.  ~ Margaret Atwood


Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.  ~ John Fowles


Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.  ~ Donald Trump