War Quotes
In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus
All war is deception.
Sun Tzu
If we don’t end wars, war will end us.
H. G. Wells
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire
War is like love it always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht
There has never been a good war, or a bad peace.
Benjamin Franklin
Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace.
Charles Summer
He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein
Another such victory, and we are undone.
Pyrrhus
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
Never, never, never believe any way will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Winston Churchill
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre
An unjust peace is better than a just war.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.
John Donne
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
George Orwell
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.
Euripides
A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.
Winston Churchill
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. 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 Bradley
Love is a kind of warfare.
Ovid
Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?
Calvin & Hobbes
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
George Santayana
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
Ulysses S. Grant
First thing I killed was no kind of thing at all. It was an enemy soldier. Which is a hell of a lot easier to say, than the first thing I ever killed was a man.
Steve Mason
John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov
The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.
Sean O'Casey