65 Impactful War Quotes

War has been a profound and often devastating part of human history, shaping societies, influencing cultures, and altering the course of nations. Its impact is vividly captured in the words of those who have experienced it firsthand—from soldiers and strategists to writers and philosophers. These voices, throughout time, have provided insights into the complex nature of conflict, emphasizing themes of bravery, futility, sacrifice, and hope. In this collection of 65 impactful war quotes, we explore the depth of human emotion and resilience in the face of adversity, offering reflections that continue to resonate today. Whether you seek inspiration, understanding, or simply a deeper appreciation of history's lessons, these quotes offer a poignant glimpse into the realities of war.

1. “Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.” - Haruki Murakami

2. “Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

3. “It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.” - Margaret Atwood

4. “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” - Winston Churchill

5. “For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war."[Funeral Oration of Pericles]” - Thucydides

6. “Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.” - George S. Patton

7. “From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” - Randall Jarrell

8. “One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.” - Henry David Thoreau

9. “We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you.” - Agnes Newton Keith

10. “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

11. “We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.” - Erich Maria Remarque

12. “How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.” - Erich Maria Remarque

13. “A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.” - H.G. Wells

14. “War is like a monster," he says, almost to himself. "War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows." He's looking at me now. "And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.” - Patrick Ness

15. “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

16. “Patriotism is nationalism, and always leads to war.” - Helen Caldicott

17. “Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.” - Philip Gourevitch

18. “This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.” - Ian McEwan

19. “This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.” - Cormac McCarthy

20. “We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love--life.Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you.” - Richard Aldington

21. “He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!” - Albert Camus

22. “Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium...Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

23. “The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends.” - Craig M. Mullaney

24. “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

25. “As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.” - Guy Sajer

26. “I let all that anger and worry go because they don't belong to me any more than the future does. And I don't wanna feel them anyhow, because the truth is, whatever happens when this war ends, here and now, far from Richmond County, I'm freer than I've ever been.” - Teresa R. Funke

27. “I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.” - Ernest Hemingway

28. “Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.” - kate dicamillo

29. “We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.” - Erich Maria Remarque

30. “They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.” - Michael Scott

31. “The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.” - Kurt Vonnegut

32. “The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact, several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak 'the same language' in real terms.” - Andrew Dalby

33. “Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.” - Laini Taylor

34. “For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

35. “They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.” - Tim O'Brien

36. “Engage the enemy more closely.” - Charles Faddis

37. “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means” - Carl von Clausewitz

38. “Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world.” - Douglas MacArthur

39. “The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.” - Stephen Crane - The Red Badget of Courage

40. “If your enemy offers you two targets, strike at a third.” - Robert Jordan

41. “Victory is always bittersweet.” - Nadia Scrieva

42. “The world is a different place in this new century, [...]. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. [...] War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.” - Joseph Boyden THREE DAY ROAD p 45

43. “You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

44. “There's a war on. We don't know how anything's going to end. We just have to grasp each fleeting moment of joy as it whizzes by.” - Rosamunde Pilcher

45. “Faut-il regretter le temps des guerres "à sens" ? souhaiter que les guerres d'aujourd'hui "retrouvent" leur sens perdu ? le monde irait-il mieux, moins bien, indifféremment, si les guerres avaient, comme jadis, ce sens qui les justifiait ? Une part de moi, celle qui a la nostalgie des guerres de résistance et des guerres antifascistes, a tendance à dire : oui, bien sûr ; rien n'est plus navrant que la guerre aveugle et insensée ; la civilisation c'est quand les hommes, tant qu'à faire, savent à peu près pourquoi ils se combattent ; d'autant que, dans une guerre qui a du sens, quand les gens savent à peu près quel est leur but de guerre et quel est celui de leur adversaire, le temps de la raison, de la négociation, de la transaction finit toujours par succéder à celui de la violence ; et d'autant (autre argument) que les guerres sensées sont aussi celles qui, par principe, sont les plus accessibles à la médiation, à l'intervention - ce sont les seules sur lesquelles des tiers, des arbitres, des observateurs engagés, peuvent espérer avoir quelque prise...Une autre part hésite. L'autre part de moi, celle qui soupçonne les guerres à sens d'être les plus sanglantes, celle qui tient la "machine à sens" pour une machine de servitude et le fait de donner un sens à ce qui n'en a pas, c'est-à-dire à la souffrance des hommes, pour un des tours les plus sournois par quoi le Diabolique nous tient, celle qui sait, en un mot, qu'on n'envoie jamais mieux les pauvres gens au casse-pipe qu'en leur racontant qu'ils participent d'une grande aventure ou travaillent à se sauver, cette part-là, donc, répond : "non ; le pire c'était le sens"; le pire c'est, comme disait Blanchot, "que le désastre prenne sens au lieu de prendre corps" ; le pire, le plus terrible, c'est d'habiller de sens le pur insensé de la guerre ; pas question de regretter, non, le "temps maudit du sens". (ch. 10De l'insensé, encore)” - Bernard-Henri Levy

46. “The handful of Germans who had reached the trench had been sacrificed for the stupid sort of fun called. Strategy, probably. Stupid! . . . It was, of course, just like German spools to go mining by candle-light. Obsoletely Nibenlungen-like. Dwarfs probably!” - Ford Madox Ford

47. “What I could not support was "a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics".” - Barack Obama

48. “When you get right down to it, militaries are essentially legalized mafias.” - Michel Templet

49. “Now. 1973. Exactly." He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. "So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we've drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe.? And is there any purpose to our lives?” - Susan Richards Shreve

50. “The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.” - Rachel Maddow

51. “Sometimes battles are unavoidable.” - Shannon A Thompson

52. “Brambleclaw dipped his head. “The battle is won,” he growled. “The clearing is ours. Do you concede or shall we fight for it again?”Blackstar flashed a look of burning hatred over his shoulder. “Take it,” he hissed. “It was never worth the blood that has been spilled here today.” - Erin Hunter

53. “Give me enough medals and I’ll win you any war” - Napoleon Bonaparte

54. “There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.” - Sun Tzu

55. “Americans tended to think of war as something that had to be done from time to time, for a particular purpose or goal. They fought not for the sake of fighting but for the sake of winning.” - David Hackett Fischer

56. “war starts from brain and ends in heart” - malik raashid

57. “En batallas taleslos que vencen son leales, los vencidos los traidores.” - Calderón

58. “What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he is talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?” - Dalton Trumbo

59. “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” - Sun Tzu

60. “Caroline rose. She studied him for a moment before sitting on his knee.He wasn't quite sure exactly how it happened. If pressed, he would have asked for three or four hundred pages to write a description of the series of impossibly graceful bendings and movements that ended with her perched there with one hand on his shoulder. He didn't understand - and he was sure that it defied physics - how Caroline could be so light on that tiny patch of his legs, and yet so weighty in the way her presence affected him. Her gaze, for instance, probably clocked in at about fifty or sixty tons, to judge from the effect it was having on him.He never wanted to move. Never, ever, ever. Let the heat death of the universe come along and he'd be quite happy to still have Caroline Hepworth sitting just like that, on his knee, looking at him without speaking. The tiny light of the shaded lantern was irrelevant. He saw everything, as if it were the brightest of middays.It was so perfect, so hoped for, that Aubrey knew it couldn't last. He glanced around.'What are you doing?' Caroline asked very, very softly.'Looking for whoever is going to interrupt us.''That's a pessimistic outlook.''Wars, especially, have a habit of ignoring the lives of people.''If you follow that through, it suggests living for the moment is best.''Live without planning? Without dreams? That sounds rather limited.''And that sounds rather like Aubrey.” - Michael Pryor

61. “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” - Otto von Bismark

62. “You can be sure of succeeding in your attacks if you only attack places which are undefended.” - Sun Tzu

63. “If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.” - Sun Tzu

64. “Freya, I killed a man.” - Kate Lord Brown

65. “Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.” - Karl Marlantes