War has been a persistent theme throughout human history, shaping nations, cultures, and individual lives. It has inspired countless expressions of courage, sacrifice, and reflection, captured in words that echo across generations. In our curated collection of 126 inspiring and thoughtful war quotes, we delve into the profound insights and sentiments shared by leaders, soldiers, and thinkers who have faced the trials of conflict. These quotes not only offer a glimpse into the complexities of war but also invite us to ponder its impact and the resilience of the human spirit. Whether delivering messages of hope, caution, or wisdom, these words continue to resonate, offering timeless reflections on the human experience amidst strife.
1. “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 in the holy name of liberty or democracy?” - Mahatma Gandhi
2. “We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in it and cover it up.” - Ray Bradbury
3. “Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.” - Dag Hammarskjöld
4. “They're in love. Fuck the war.” - Thomas Pynchon
5. “There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.” - Havelock Ellis
6. “The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …” - George Orwell
7. “not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.” - Walt Whitman
8. “Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.” - Walt Whitman
9. “The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!"When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.” - Bertolt Brecht
10. “War is not nice.” - Barbara Bush
11. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war. And until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation, until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. And until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race, there is war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, rule of international morality, will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained... now everywhere is war.”- Popularized by Bob Marley in the song War” - Haile Selassie I
12. “Tracer lighting up the sky.It's another families' turn to die.A child afraid to even cry out says,He has been here.And I see no bravery,No bravery in your eyes anymore.Only sadness.” - James Blunt
13. “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
14. “You don`t have to do anything. Why worry? It`s all god`s plan anyway. Just love everyone and believe. Be a limp-wristed wimp and recruit others to be the same. But, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar`s. When Caesar says drop bombs on christian babies in Berlin, or Muslim babies in Iraq, it`s okay. When Caesar says open your borders to tens of millions of dark immigrants, or to bus your children to jungle neighborhoods, or to accept legalized pornography an the abortion murder of babies, then it is Caesar`s responsibility, not the Christian`s. So don`t concern yourselves. ” - Frazier Glenn Miller
15. “The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.” - Adolf Hitler
16. “Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.” - Sherwood Smith
17. “War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous...” - Leo Tolstoy
18. “Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.” - Rebecca West
19. “Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.” - Chris Hedges
20. “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” - Ron Paul
21. “So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.” - Voltaire
22. “This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.” - Douglas MacArthur
23. “You cannot choose your battlefield,God does that for you;But you can plant a standardWhere a standard never flew.(From The Colors)” - Nathalia Crane
24. “This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.” - Clint Eastwood
25. “In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!” - Jack Kornfield
26. “Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.” - Mitch Albom
27. “Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.” - Susan Sontag
28. “And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.” - Leo Tolstoy
29. “One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
30. “...this protracted war will pass through three stages. The first stage covers the period of the enemy's strategic offensive and our strategic defensive. The second stage will be the period of the enemy's strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive. The third stage will be the period of our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy's strategic retreat.” - Mao Zedong
31. “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.” - Cormac McCarthy
32. “In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims? ” - Dwight Eisenhower
33. “It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.” - Jessie Douglas Kerruish
34. “Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12” - Erich Maria Remarque
35. “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” - Chris Hedges
36. “I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.” - Montesquieu
37. “The Cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom. The cost of wearing the uniform can be high, but... [very long pause] sometimes it's too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question "Why?" Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore. ” - Ronald Moore
38. “Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean.But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met.To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction from the meeting point.And the two countries are still at war.” - Vera Nazarian
39. “And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.” - Christopher Hitchens
40. “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” - Thomas Mann
41. “All other trades are contained in that of war.Is that why war endures?No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.That's your notion.The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.” - Cormac McCarthy
42. “This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.” - Cormac McCarthy
43. “Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
44. “war grows out of desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.” - Napoleon Hill
45. “Smartass Disciple: Master, you should teach people not to do war to each other.Master of Stupidity: I should teach people how to win their minds of their wars.” - Toba Beta
46. “The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.''Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")” - David J. Schow
47. “War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.” - Karl Kraus
48. “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.” - Wilfred Owen
49. “You're not like other Wasps.""Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score.""A few," Salma allowed."Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.” - Adrian Tchaikovsky
50. “War between free-will and predestination makes the idea of time travel is still too difficult to digest.” - Toba Beta
51. “I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.'The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.'There was some subdued laughter.'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there.” - Bob Woodward
52. “My Gullah grandfather is bringing a bag of dust to a vampire war. I feel better.” - Elle Jasper
53. “There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.” - Seth Grahame-Smith
54. “When you are dealing with an invisible enemy,use most resources as shield, and a bit as a bait.” - Toba Beta
55. “Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.” - Lydia Millet
56. “Did you see the frightened ones,Did you hear the falling bombs,Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter in the promise of a brave new world unfurlled beaneath the clear blue skies.Good bye blue skies.” - Roger Waters
57. “Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.” - George Orwell
58. “Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.” - Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
59. “Frankly, our ancestors don't seem much to brag about. I mean, look at the state they left us in, with the wars, the broken planet. Clearly, they didn't care about what would happen to the people who came after them.” - Suzanne Collins
60. “There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.” - M.F.K. Fisher
61. “One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.” - Teresa R. Funke
62. “One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.” - Andy Rooney
63. “This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.” - George Packer
64. “Peace is not an easy prospect--it requires greater bravery than does conflict.” - Ozzie Zehner
65. “Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.” - George Alec Effinger
66. “This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next.” - John le Carré
67. “If you had hope, maybe you could find a way to make things change,. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try.” - Suzanne Collins
68. “The guns reminded me that this was just an attempt to punch holes in the darkness that enveloped us now.” - Michael Poeltl
69. “The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” - Herman Melville
70. “We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good. -from her blog” - Catherynne M. Valente
71. “When nations resort to arms, the human spirit is like a bird that cannot stand to hear its own song.” - Phoenix Desmond
72. “I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.” - Siegfried Sassoon
73. “But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.” - Leo Tolstoy
74. “The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.” - Jared Diamond
75. “Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” - Sebastian Junger
76. “The only thing worse than a Mexican Stand Off is a Peace Pact that Fails!” - Stanley Victor Paskavich
77. “Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
78. “To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind” - Henrik Ibsen
79. “Politics is war without blood, while war is politics with blood.” - Mao Tse-tung
80. “A bad peace is worse than war.” - Tacitus
81. “Let us pray now for the future dead. Though we do not yet know their names, we know that there shall be far too many of them.” - Seth Grahame-Smith
82. “I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?""Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history.” - William Styron
83. “My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.” - Sarah Miller
84. “The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.” - Brenna Yovanoff
85. “War is too important to be left to the generals” - Georges Clemenceau
86. “Diplomacy never works.” - Nadia Scrieva
87. “Are there anything more dishonourable and more coward than not marching in front of the army after taking the decision of war as a politician? Sending others for dying but keeping himself in safety is the affair of the low man only!” - Mehmet Murat ildan
88. “Hey, I am thinking of it myself, in this part of world (East), we all do endeavors in praying and are sweating (white liquid) and this is our situation, frustrated , but on the other part of world (West) ,they are enjoying in party and drinking liquor (white liquid) but their situation is that, successful, I do not know that the problem relates to the type of liquid or the way of drinking!!” - Ali Shariati
89. “Instead he felt only love. And that was the miracle. The surge in hatred since the war began had created more love around it. It was indomitable, mad, and everlasting, scattered through the rich and the poor, deep and calm in the Quakers, hot and fierce in the mothers, faithful in the warriors, wistful in the pets, seeping its way into mercy and atrocity, destroying things, rebuilding them.” - Kathy Hepinstall
90. “We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die.” - David Gemmell
91. “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.” - Julia Ward Howe
92. “Les personnages de nos autres vies sont des fantômes que la littérature fait revivre.” - Olivier Weber
93. “The war had been a daily thought, a continual consciousness in her life for two years, but never a real presence. Battles were things that were fought somewhere else, won somehow, by someone, and lost by someone else. Now as she stood by her own door and listened to the cannons, it was with a chilling, dreadfully full and clear realization that men were out on the field beneath that gray cloud taking each other’s lives.” - Elisabeth Grace Foley
94. “Well, then he would be at war with the government, and death was an unfortunate side effect of any revolution. Change always had a price tag. But once he took over, the people would realize he was a better ruler than the disorganized, self-interested mob that called themselves Congress -- men who didn't know anything, being led by a president who knew even less.” - C.J. Hill
95. “America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory wasn’t uncontested, it was positively devastating.” - Max Brooks
96. “I find it significant that most military veterans become pacifists.” - Michel Templet
97. “For my love, I will wade through an ocean of blood, even if it destroys me” - Christopher Paolini
98. “The actual truth has never written about any war, and this will be no exception.” - George Lynch
99. “Sometimes battles are unavoidable.” - Shannon A Thompson
100. “A diferença nos tempos de decisão pode ser interpretada como um indicador de maiores escrúpulos por parte dos ingleses. Por outro lado, tal diferença podia ter origem na simples vantagem que um ditador tem (em caso de guerra) sobre um governo democrático. Não será de todo injusto afirmar que Churchill estava consciente desta última situação. Nas memórias que escreveria mais tarde nota-se o quanto sofreu com os debates que se prolongaram ao longo de meses, acabando por demorar precisamente o tempo necessário até todo o empreendimento perder o seu sentido estratégico; tudo por causa de decisões tomadas sem convicção e novamente descartadas, do vai e vem, dos compromissos, da necessidade de argumentar justamente onde ele queria decidir e comandar.” - Sebastian Haffner
101. “In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.” - Aberjhani
102. “Fears don't exist in isolation. They tend to rise and fall depending on what people think they can do about them.” - Peter Beinart
103. “war starts from brain and ends in heart” - malik raashid
104. “He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.” - Madeline Miller
105. “It's when the 'international community' expresses 'concern' about your 'situation' that your situation is well and truly fucked.” - Michael D. Weiss
106. “The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.” - Hermann Hesse
107. “What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.” - David Mitchell
108. “The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.” - Paul Hoffman
109. “The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men.” - Jeff Shaara
110. “Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.” - Paul Fussell
111. “If his forces are united, separate them.” - Sun Tzu
112. “Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.” - Sun Tzu
113. “The Regency,' said Laurent, addressing the troop, 'thought to take us outnumbered. It expected us to roll over without a fight.'Damen said: 'We will not let them cow us, subdue us or force us down. Ride hard. Don't stop to fight the front line. We are going to smash them open. We are here to fight for our Prince!'The cry rang out, For the Prince! The men gripped their swords, slammed their visors down, and the sound they made was a roar.” - S.U. Pacat
114. “There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.” - Bernard Cornwell
115. “... the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.” - Howard Zinn
116. “One should never fight for a country. One should fight, if one has to, for what one believes to be right. A country is only as good as its leading citizens.” - Garry Kilworth
117. “poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you” - Walt Whitman
118. “Oh, diplomacy," said M.D., in his element, "it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.” - David Mitchell
119. “It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.” - Walter Mosley
120. “A true warrior,” she said, “does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.” - Christopher Paolini
121. “When the common soldiers are too strong and their officers too weak, the result is INSUBORDINATION.” - Sun Tzu
122. “Success in warfare is gained by carefully accommodating ourselves to the enemy's purpose.” - Sun Tzu
123. “At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.” - Sun Tzu
124. “Move not unless you see an advantage; use not your troops unless there is something to be gained; fight not unless the position is critical.” - Sun Tzu
125. “Freya, I killed a man.” - Kate Lord Brown
126. “Those who are skilled in combat do not become angry. The wise win before the fight and the ignorant fight to win.” - Ziad K. Abdelnour
