Quotes About Waging War

“Most people spend their whole lives waging war-against people they don't even know. And against themselves, whom they know least of all.
from BETWEEN TWO DESERTS”

— Germaine Shames

“I think I can say quite clearly and explicitly that the various types of actions which we call terrorism are not only not encouraged, they are explicitly forbidden by Sharia Law .. It is true that waging war is a religious obligation, but precisely because it is a religious obligation , it is regulated by religious law .. even medieval Sharia texts go into astonishing detail into what is permitted and what is not permitted .. The Sharia requires that proper warning be given before beginning hostilities .. it has elaborate regulations regarding the treatment of civilians, the women and the children and the aged .. it discusses how prisoners should be treated .. what weapons should be used .. they discuss and for the most part reject the use of chemical weapons.”

— Bernard Lewis

“This book is not the memoir of a contented man. It's not the poignant reflections of a white-haired guru who has finally figured out the secret to contentment. It's more like sweaty, bloody, hastily scribbled notes from a battlefield. I'm still struggling to escape the sinister fingers on this conspiracy. I'm still waging war against the discontentment that rages in my life. I can see contentment in the distance, like a hazy oasis, but I have to pick my way through a minefield to get there. I'm not the contented man God wants me to be, but I'm fighting to get there. I'm writing this book the hope that you'll join me in the fight.”

— Stephen Altrogge

“I sing, not to hear the echo repeat, a shade fainter, my song! I think of light and not of glory! Singing is my fashion of waging war and bearing witness. And if my song is the proudest of songs, it is that I sing clearly to make the day rise clear!”

— Edmond Rostand

“The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.”

— Feisal Abdul Rauf

“Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.”

— Fredrik Bajer

“To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that "we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." "Lynch's Law," and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture-an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people.”

— Arthur Herman

“Government is waging war against the people.”

— L. Neil Smith

“Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.”

— Molly Ivins

“It was wrong to do this," said the angel.
"You should live like a flower,
Holding malice like a puppy,
Waging war like a lambkin."
"Not so," quoth the man
Who had no fear of spirits;
"It is only wrong for angels
Who can live like the flowers,
Holding malice like the puppies,
Waging war like the lambkins.”

— Stephen Crane

“I do not understand what I do ... It is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me ... For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing ... I find this law at work: when I want to do good, evil is right there with me ... I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin ... I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”

— Anonymous.

“Number one, that it is smart to communicate and negotiate with your enemy instead of just waging war with bombs and weapons of mass destruction.”

— Theodore C. Sorensen

“These critics thought that the general commercialization of English life, including the rise of trading companies, banks, stock markets, speculators, and new moneyed men, had undermined traditional values and threatened England with ruin. The monarchy and its minions had used patronage, the national debt, and the Bank of England to corrupt the society, including the House of Commons, and to build up the executive bureaucracy at the expense of the people's liberties, usually for the purpose of waging war.”

— Gordon S. Wood

“We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers.”

— Otto Schily

“The most dangerous fundamentalists aren't just waging war in Iraq; they're attacking evolution, blocking medical research and ignoring the environment.”

— Jill Greenberg

“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not ... with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

“Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war-except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war-short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide-is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong-wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero.”

— Susan Sontag

“WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.”

— Jesse Ventura

“With that characteristic touch of late-Romanov rashness, the government, by ukase of August 22, extended prohibition for the duration of the war. As the sale of vodka was a state monopoly, this act at one stroke cut off a third of the government's income. It was well known, commented a bewildered member of the Duma, that governments waging war seek by a variety of taxes and levies to increase income, but never since the dawn of history has a country in time of war renounced the principal source of its revenue.”

— Barbara W. Tuchman

“Reports of coalition bombs on civilian targets such as flour-mills wins more converts. "Many people now view the coalition as waging war on Islam, not extremism," says Usama Shehadeh, a Quietist preacher in Amman who fears he is losing his flock.”

— Anonymous.

“As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites.”

— Samantha Power

“Use convention to govern a state, use surprise in waging war, use disinterest to take the world. How do I know this is so? When there are many taboos in the world, the people grow poorer and poorer. When the people have many weapons, the nation grows more benighted. When the people are very crafty, weird things arise more and more. The greater the articulation of rules of law, the more brigands and outlaws there are. Therefore a wise rulers says, If I contrive nothing, the people will naturally be civilized. If I am fond of tranquility, the people will naturally be upright.  If I am disinterested, the people will naturally become rich.  If I want not to want, the people will naturally be innocent.”

— Lao Tzu

“Overseas, America's fighting men and women have been waging war against those who would attack America and plunge the world into a period of darkness, and their success can easily be seen.”

— Mark Kennedy

“Republican Robert La Follette of Wisconsin had defied the machine to become governor by waging war on the railroads that ruled his state.”

— Doris Kearns Goodwin

“Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov's habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.”

— Neal Stephenson

“I'm waging war, love. And the only way to win this kind of war is to make you want to lose.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“Religion robs the soul of its independence; patriotism is the stupid worship of the world for which the well-being and the peace of the inhabitants were sacrificed by those who profit by it, while the laws of the land, in restraining natural desires, were waging war on the manifest spirit of the law of our beings. Compared with this," he concluded, "thieving is an honorable pursuit."[5]”

— Emma Goldman

“But from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.”

— Stacy Schiff

“So much for the crusade against drugs ... all America is actually doing is consolidating its position as the biggest dealer in addictive and lethal substances on the planet, waging war on all rivals, whether they take the form of the Thai domestic tobacco industry or the Colombian cocaine cartels.”

— Alexander Cockburn

“Don't worry about this world; it is not broken. And don't worry about others. You worry more about them than they do. There are people waging war; there are people on the battlefield who are more alive than they've ever been before. Don't try to protect people from life; just let them have their experience while you focus upon your own experience.”

— Esther Hicks

“Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all ... There are hundreds of other [Koranic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of Mohammed] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim!”

— Ruhollah Khomeini

“For in this modern world, the instruments of warfare are not solely for waging war. Far more importantly, they are the means for controlling peace. Naval officers must therefore understand not only how to fight a war, but how to use the tremendous power which they operate to sustain a world of liberty and justice, without unleashing the powerful instruments of destruction and chaos that they have at their command.”

— Arleigh Burke

“Human beings have been waging war and destroying the environment for long time. Just because it has been going on for a long time and become an unquestioned habit, does that mean it should be allowed to continue.”

— Sharon Gannon

“They've not been able to control any Iraqi city. We're waging war against this snake and we will be victorious.”

— Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

“Waging war is not a primary physical need.”

— Susan Griffin

“Journalists go to press briefings at the Ministry of Defense in London or the Pentagon in Washington, and no critical questions are posed at all. It's just a news-gathering operation, and the fact that the news is being given by governments who are waging war doesn't seem to worry many journalists too much.”

— Tariq Ali

“During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.”

— John Pilger

“We've got to show that blacks and whites are treated equally in the army. Otherwise, what's the point of waging war on Hitler?”

— Josephine Baker

“Lastly, waging war against good people is bad for the soul. This may not seem important to you now, but it's the most important thing I've said.”

— Joshua

“I'm ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“I will not wage war against women and children! I have instructed my air force to limit their attacks to military objectives. However, if the enemy should conclude from this that he might get away with waging war in a different manner he will receive an answer that he'll be knocked out of his wits!”

— Adolf Hitler

“I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory.”

— Adolf Hitler

“Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not extermination, but the frenzy of it created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to genocide.”

— Howard Zinn

“Even in waging war, cherish the spirit of peace-maker; that, by conquering those whom you attack, you may lead them back to the advantages of peace.”

— Saint Augustine

“Fundamentalists believe that we don't believe in anything. In their view of the world, they are in possession of absolute certainties, while we are descending into decadence. We will be able to triumph over terrorism not by waging war on it, but through a conscious, fearless way of life.”

— Salman Rushdie

“Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war”

— Elie Wiesel

“We in astrophysics we think of the universe all the time. So to us, Earth is just another planet. From a distance, it's a speck. And I'm convinced that if everyone had a cosmic perspective you wouldn't have legions of armies waging war on other people because someone would say, "Stop, look at the universe."”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“Born in the same land, we ought to live as brothers, doing to each other all the good we can, and not listening to wicked men, who may endeavor to make us enemies. By living in peace, we can help and prosper one another; by waging war, we can kill and destroy many on both sides; but those who survive will not be the happier for that.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or of waging war against tyrants.”

— Patrick Henry

“Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).”

— Paulo Coelho