Quotes About War

“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”

— Rudyard Kipling

“This was where war happened, in someone's backyard. Sometimes it was yours. Often, it was someone's a world away. But it did happen. In this moment. In the next breath. Every day.
Every day, someone lived in the midst of destruction and chaos. Every day, someone's flower boxes filled with gunpowder's haze, a child's laughter turned to tears. There had been a day when someone watered those flowers in the evening's peaceful quiet and the children caught fireflies in mason jars. And that day will come again, when the crickets and the bullets no longer have to compete for the night's stage. But for now, all anyone could do was fight on the crickets' behalf.”

— Kelseyleigh Reber

“In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. *This* makes them do *that* ... But the war does not make sense. War senselessly wounds everyone right down the line. A body bag fits more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six-and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war has done ... War when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable. It is not an occasion for heroism. It is an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guarantees its inevitable reappearance.”

— Tom Bissell

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.”

— Alexander Masters

“Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older norms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon ... the looks of adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be, nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, and mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home.”

— William Morris

“I find no peace, and all my war is done,
I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind yet can I not arise;
And naught I have and all the world I seize on.
That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I scape nowise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth none occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life
And my delight is causer of this strife.”

— Thomas Wyatt

“War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.”

— Thucydides

“Everybody's gotta have somebody to step on. Makes 'em feel important.'
'But there have to be better, more productive ways of proving your worth in the world - ways that don't involve crushing other people. Isn't that why we fought the war?”

— Juliann Garey

“This incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.”

— Anthony Marra

“We both have war inside us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.”

— Veronica Roth

“Wait, I got it. We, uh, won the battle and lost the war, or was it the other way around? 'Cause around here, it's hard to tell sometimes.”

— Kami Garcia

“Our nation declared a war on people trapped in racially segregated ghettos-just at the moment their economies had collapsed-rather than providing community investment, quality education, and job training when work disappeared. Of course those communities are suffering from serious crime and dysfunction today. Did we expect otherwise? Did we think that, miraculously, they would thrive?”

— Michelle Alexander

“It was announced as a French victory by the French Minister of War. I did not see any sign of victory but only the retreat of the French forces engaged in the battle.”

— Philip Gibbs

“I wouldn't accept losing as a team, wouldn't accept losing as my team. It's like a war every practice. I think it helped us a lot.”

— Peter Forsberg

“The more civilized a nation, the more conformed its population, until that civilization's last age arrives, when multiplicity wages war with conformity. The former grows ever wilder, ever more dysfunctional in its extremities; whilst the latter seeks to increase its measure of control, until such efforts acquire diabolical tyranny.'
- Traveller”

— Steven Erikson

“I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture.”

— Robert Capa

“A Seelie. A fucking prince," Lor said. "He's got a couple hundred more Seelie from a dozen different castes waiting outside. Threatening war. Demanding you shut the place down, stop feeding the Unseelie."
I gasped, "V'lane?"
"You told him to come!" Ryodan accused.
"She knows him?" Lor exploded.
"It's her other boyfriend," Ryodan said.
"Besides Darroc?" one of the other men demanded.
Lor glared at Barrons. "When are you going to wise up and shut that bitch down for good?”

— Karen Marie Moning

“Trying to change old habits is like fighting a war in your head-a draining and exhausting skirmish that makes you wonder at your chance of survival.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

“Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.”

— Samuel E. Morison

“To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

“Anything that doesn't fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called 'genre fiction,' and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms, as it were, for the misdemeanor of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are, therefore, not about 'real life,' which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action-adventure, unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes, and they are, therefore, not solid.”

— Margaret Atwood

“You know better than I," he said, "that all courts-martial are farces and that you're really paying for the crimes of
other people, because this time we're going to win the war at any price. Wouldn't you have done the same in my place?"
General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. "Probably," he said. "But what
worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it's a natural death." He laid his glasses on
the bed and took off his watch and chain. "What worries me," he went on "is that out of so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness." He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.
"At this rate," he concluded, "you'll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you'll shoot
my dear friend Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience.”

— Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez

“The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.”

— Barack Obama

“Do you know the Guardians?" I asked Zay. "Is there some kind of club or yearly get-together where Guardians get drunk, wear funny hats, and compare war stories?”

— Devon Monk

“Saddam Hussein was a CIA operative whom the American spy agency deployed in 1959 to kill the ruler of Iraq, Abdul Karim Kassem. When that assassination attempt failed, Saddam entered a CIA protection program in Egypt until his Baath Party, also supported by the CIA, seized power in 1963. At least 5,000 Iraqis, most of them student activists, were executed immediately by the Baathist regime. And so our Iraq War began.”

— Anonymous.

“Either a species learns to control its own population, or something like disease, famine, war, will take care of the issue.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“I had old bunk beds that my dad got from Seabrook Farms. They were first used by German prisoners during World War II, who were sent to work the farms during the war. The metal beds with their thin mattresses could easily be used as a jungle gym and I loved them.”

— David Mixner

“States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs ...”

— H.G. Wells

“We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber's targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the rate of civilian deaths rose sharply and now stands at 90 percent. In the West we solemnize the deaths of our regular troops carefully and recurrently honor the memory of the soldier who dies do his country. Yet the civilian deaths we cause are rarely mentioned, and there has been no sustained outcry in the West against them. Suicide bombing shocks us to the core; but should it be more shocking than the deaths of thousands of children in their homelands every every year because of land mines? Or collateral damage in a drone strike?”

— Karen Armstrong

“And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?”

— Peter Watts

“If we are at war, we're not fighting for a bewitched alchemical manuscript, or for my safety, or for our right to marry and have children. This is about the future of all of us." I saw that future for just a moment, its bright potential spooling away in a thousand different directions. "If our children don't take the next evolutionary steps, it will be someone else's children. And whiskey isn't going to make it possible for me to close my eyes and forget that. No one else will go through this kind of hell because they love someone they're not supposed to love. I won't allow it.”

— Deborah Harkness

“In fact, the same difficulties faced by Reagan in the 1980-s are still there [in the beginning of 21 century]: how do you hit a bullet with a bullet? The technology is getting better, but it still is focused on one interceptor knocking down one missile. In war, there would be many more challenges, more chaos, more uncertainty.”

— David Hoffman

“It is an old adage, "All is fair in love as in war," but I thought not of general laws, and only felt a private grievance.”

— Jane Swisshelm

“To read a lot of trash mixing the blood of war with business's stench. To root out any happiness. To go out, and down, and on the road. To hesitate; to go on, and ahead, and back, and up the stairs, and in one's room. On the way, to notice that the mountain is still there. To lie and sleep, deeply, heavily. To reproduce night's sleep. To wake up, look through the window at green water, from the Bay to the mountain, and return to one's self. To remember that war is devastating Irak. To feel pain.”

— Etel Adnan

“Preparedness never caused a war and unpreparedness never prevented one.”

— Florence Prag Kahn

“Don't go to war no more. Steady peace because peace is all we need.”

— Katherine Jackson

“[Charles] Manson wanted to start a race war. Nobody said he was leading some sort of charge about white supremacy.”

— Mark Steyn

“In a time of war the nation is always of one mind, eager to hear something good of themselves and ill of the enemy. At this time the task of the news-writer is easy; they have nothing to do but to tell that a battle is expected, and afterwards that a battle has been fought, in which we and our friends, whether conquering or conquered, did all, and our enemies did nothing.”

— Samuel Johnson

“We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“We understand that Nixon's aggression against Vietnam is a racist aggression, that the American war in Vietnam is a racist war, a white man's war ... We deplore that you are being used as cannon fodder for U.S. imperialism. We've seen photographs of American bombs and antipersonnel weapons being dropped, wantonly, accidentally perhaps, on your heads, on the heads of your comrades.”

— Jane Fonda

“Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind. Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -A field where a thousand corpses lie. Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.”

— Stephen Crane

“Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing.”

— Ayn Rand

“Donald Trump got in some trouble for saying that John McCain is not a war hero, and said, 'I like people that weren't captured.' Not good. In fact, Trump's people are telling him to lay low for a while until this all combs over.”

— Jimmy Fallon

“If America is at war, I won't speak a word without measuring how it'll sound to the guys doing the fighting when they're listening to their radios in the desert.”

— John F. Kerry

“Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.”

— Carl Jung

“More than two decades later, it is hard to imagine the Revolutionary War coming out any other way.”

— George W. Bush

“The so-called Philosophy of India is even more blowsy and senseless than the metaphysics of the West. It is at war with everything we know of the workings of the human mind, and with every sound idea formulated by mankind. If it prevailed in the whole modern world we'd still be in the Thirteenth Century; nay, we'd be back among the Egyptians of the pyramid age. Its only coherent contribution to Western thought has been theosophy-and theosophy is as idiotic as Christian Science. It has absolutely nothing to offer a civilized white man.”

— H.L. Mencken

“This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity.”

— Lyndon B. Johnson

“But who in war will not have his laugh amid the skulls?”

— Winston Churchill