Motivational Quotes

War

One of the chief misfortunes of honest people is that they are cowardly.

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about War

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Woolf, Virginia

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

Poe, Edgar Allan

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

Hoover, Herbert Clark

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Agatha Christie

All men would be cowards if they could.

Rochester, Earl

There are two things which will always be very difficult for a democratic nation: to start a war and to end it.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Hemingway, Ernest

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once'The Unnecessary War'.

Sir Winston Churchill

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

I hate a fellow whom pride, or cowardice, or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Thoreau, Henry David

12.

He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.

Confucius

13.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

14.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

Lennon, John

15.

War is the trade of Kings.

Dryden, John

16.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.

Clausewitz, Karl Von

18.

The greatest braggarts are usually the biggest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

19.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Graves, Robert

20.

A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.

Rufus, Quintus Curtius

21.

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.

Rockefeller, John D.

22.

Faint heart never won fair lady.

Cervantes, Miguel De

23.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

Reagan, Ronald

24.

The cowards never started -- and the weak died along the way.

25.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

Mencken, H. L.

26.

He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

Penn, William

27.

Companies that give excellent service reward employees for providing it.

28.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine. They are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior... jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.

Nightingale, Florence

30.

Either war is obsolete or men are.

R. Buckminster Fuller

31.

War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.

Mumford, Lewis

32.

A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

Jefferson, Thomas

33.

Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.

Cooke, E. V.

34.

Are wars... anything but the means whereby a nation's problems are set, where creation is stimulated -- there you have adventure. But there is no adventure in heads-or-tails, in betting that the toss will come out of life or death. War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

35.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

Twain, Mark

36.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

Gellhorn, Martha

37.

War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself.

Hobsbawm, E. J.

38.

So you think you can tell heaven from hell blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, a smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts hot ashes for trees, hot air for a cool breeze, cold comfort for change? Did you exchange a walk on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?

Waters, R.

39.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Orwell, George

40.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

41.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Bismarck, Otto Von

42.

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

Benedict, Ruth

43.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

George Orwell

44.

What are we hoping to get out of it, what's it all in aid of -- is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?

Osborne, John

45.

I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.

Russell, Bertrand

46.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi

47.

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.

Talmud, The

48.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

Churchill, Winston

49.

It is far easier to make war than to make peace.

Clemenceau, Georges

50.

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.