Quotes
Instructive Quotes About War
Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.
Benjamin Franklin
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
Henry David Thoreau
When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.
Winston Churchill
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
Benjamin Franklin
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Sun Tzu
You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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
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
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
John F. Kennedy
What a cruel thing war is... to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors.
Robert E. Lee
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu
You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.
Sun Tzu
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
The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
William Westmoreland
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.
Norman Schwarzkopf
War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Bertrand Russell
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
Herbert Hoover
When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
George S. Patton
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 surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.
John Randolph
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
It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it.
George McGovern
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
George Washington
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
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
Havelock Ellis
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Omar N. Bradley
To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
George Washington
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
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
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
See also