WAR QUOTES VIII

quotations about war

A long war like this makes you realise the society you really prefer, the home, goats chickens and dogs and casual acquaintances. I find myself not caring at all for gardens flowers or vegetables cats cows and rabbits, one gets tired of trees vines and hills, but houses, goats chickens dogs and casual acquaintances never pall.

GERTRUDE STEIN

Wars I Have Seen


War among men defiles this world.

T. S. ELIOT

Murder in the Cathedral

Tags: T. S. Eliot


War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.

ADRIENNE RICH

What is Found There

Tags: Adrienne Rich


Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses
All bent upon killing, because their "of courses"
Are not quite the same.

AMY LOWELL

"A Ballad of Footmen"

Tags: Amy Lowell


Weakness and ambivalence lead to war.

GEORGE H. W. BUSH

RNC acceptance speech, August 18, 1988

Tags: George H. W. Bush


All we've ever done is fight. Fight for freedom. Fight for justice. All we have to do is forgive.

ASHLYN RYAN

"War is bad -- why not talk out our problems?", The Altamont Enterprise, February 4, 2016


So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way.

WILLIAM JAMES

The Moral Equivalent of War

Tags: William James


War is a beastly business, it is true, but one proof we are human is our ability to learn, even from it, how better to exist.

M. F. K. FISHER

introduction to revised edition, How to Cook a Wolf

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NIXON: The only place where you and I disagree ... is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care. KISSINGER: I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.

RICHARD NIXON & HENRY KISSINGER

attributed, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers


It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require.

PETER BEINART

"How America Shed the Taboo Against Preventive War", The Atlantic, April 21, 2017


War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peace-time.

IAN HAY

The First Hundred Thousand

Tags: Ian Hay


War seldom enters but where wealth allures.

JOHN DRYDEN

The Hind and the Panther

Tags: John Dryden


When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Plague

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The nation having the strongest war footing can easily find an excuse for going to war.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts

Tags: Lewis F. Korns


The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

Christmas sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, 1957

Tags: Martin Luther King, Jr.


The line, broken into moving fragments by the ground, went calmly on through fields and woods. The youth looked at the men nearest him, and saw, for the most part, expressions of deep interest, as if they were investigating something that had fascinated them. One or two stepped with overvaliant airs as if they were already plunged into war. Others walked as upon thin ice. The greater part of the untested men appeared quiet and absorbed. They were going to look at war, the red animal--war, the blood-swollen god. And they were deeply engrossed in this march.

STEPHEN CRANE

The Red Badge of Courage

Tags: Stephen Crane


We are now in the midst of our first television war ... the television environment [is] total and therefore invisible. Along with the computer, it has altered every phase of the American vision and identity. The television war has meant the end of the dichotomy between civilian and military. The public is now a participant in every phase of the war, and the main actions of the war are now being fought in the American home itself.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN

War and Peace in the Global Village

Tags: Marshall McLuhan


What lackeys men are, who might be such fine fellows!
To be killing each other, unmercifully,
At an order, as though one said, "Bring up the tea."

AMY LOWELL

"A Ballad of Footmen"

Tags: Amy Lowell


Eventually, you hope. Obviously, we're not in a position at the moment for the eradication of war to seem like anything but a far-off dream. But at one time, the eradication of slave markets in the United States seemed very far off. I mean, people have to begin somewhere. We can change. We can evolve as a species. It's not simple, and it's a very long and drawn-out process, but you can hope.

SUZANNE COLLINS

interview, Hogwarts Professor, August 15, 2010

Tags: Suzanne Collins


No one should be surprised at the prominence given to war. We are dealing with early ages: nation-making is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Physics and Politics

Tags: Walter Bagehot