Famous Quotes

634 Trending War Quotes

Most popular quotes in War category.

If it were a fact, it wouldn't be called intelligence.

Donald Rumsfeld

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

John Stuart Mill

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

H. L. Mencken

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.

Leo Tolstoy

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Sweat saves blood.

Erwin Rommel

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Blaise Pascal

War is a defeat for humanity.

Pope John Paul II

Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.

Duke of Wellington

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Albert Einstein

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

John Adams

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.

Sun Tzu

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Ludwig von Mises

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

Jeannette Rankin

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

John F. Kennedy

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

Sun Tzu

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

Douglas MacArthur

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Paul Valery

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Douglas MacArthur

The heroes of Flight 93 won the first battle in the War on Terror, and they should never be forgotten.

Jim Ramstad

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

Albert Einstein

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

Winston Churchill

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

Joan Baez

Remember, God provides the best camouflage several hours out of every 24.

David M. Shoup

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

Omar N. Bradley

Every year, I hear about Thanksgiving. Who do one give thanks to? ... And who is giving thanks? What are they giving thanks for? For lots of poverty that's on the earth and lots of war that is a-rumoring all over the earth? For lots of people who die daily and the crime that multiply?

Peter Tosh

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.

Will Rogers

Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.

Red Auerbach

Every year, I hear about Thanksgiving. Who do one give thanks to? ... And who is giving thanks? What are they giving thanks for? For lots of poverty that's on the earth and lots of war that is a-rumoring all over the earth? For lots of people who die daily and the crime that multiply?

Peter Tosh

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Winston Churchill

Conquered, we conquer.

Plautus

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

Herodotus

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

Benjamin Franklin

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Thomas Jefferson

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

John F. Kennedy

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

George S. Patton

War is fear cloaked in courage.

William Westmoreland

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Barbara W. Tuchman

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

Thomas A. Edison

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Hiram Johnson

I have not yet begun to fight!

John Paul Jones

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, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Winston Churchill

I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.

Shel Silverstein

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

Herbert Hoover

An army marches on its stomach.

Napoleon Bonaparte

War would end if the dead could return.

Stanley Baldwin

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

George Santayana

War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.

Sophocles

All warfare is based on deception.

Unknown

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Bertrand Russell

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

Ernest Hemingway

It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

Norman Schwarzkopf

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

George Washington

Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.

Euripides

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

Napoleon Hill

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

John Adams

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

Ernest Hemingway

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.

William Westmoreland

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

Karl Kraus

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Voltaire

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

Ludwig von Mises

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.

Ulysses S. Grant

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

Douglas MacArthur

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Albert Einstein

If we don't end war, war will end us.

H. G. Wells

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

Napoleon Bonaparte

War is the science of destruction.

John Abbott

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

George S. Patton

All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.

Francois Fenelon

The State thrives on war - unless, of course, it is defeated and crushed - expands on it, glories in it.

Murray Rothbard

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

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

Salvador Dali

The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.

John Randolph

The war... was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.

Robert E. Lee

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.

George Washington

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

George McGovern

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

Isaac Asimov

A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.

George S. Patton

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

Ernest Hemingway

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Friedman

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

George Herbert

The great object is that every man be armed.

Patrick Henry

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Carl Sandburg

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

George Orwell

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.

Otto von Bismarck