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War, what is it good for? Welcome to our collection of quotes about war; many of them are cautionary, and all of them thought-provoking. Peace to you.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

--John Steinbeck

A bad peace is even worse than war.

--Tacitus

Those who declare war are seldom those who fight.

--Wayne Gerard Trotman

After every war someone has to tidy up.

--Wislawa Szymborska

War is not, in itself, a condition so much as the symptom of a condition -- that of international anarchy.

--Alfred Hermann Fried

War is the cemetery of futures promised.

--John Cory

If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.

--Hamilton Fish

When war is declared, truth is the first casualty.

--Arthur Ponsonby

The worst thing about this war is the chance it gives these dreadful little persons, the chance to make themselves important.

--Arthur Wimperis

The best ambassador is a warship.

--Michelle J. Howard

In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.

--Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

War implies a lack of comprehension of mutual national interests; it means the undermining and even the end of culture.

--Carlos Saavedra Lamas

War of aggression, war which does not imply defense of one's country, is a collective crime.

--Carlos Saavedra Lamas

During war, the laws are silent.

--Quintus Tullius Cicero

Criticism in a time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government.

--Robert Taft

If peace only had the music and pageantry of war, there'd be no wars.

--Sophie Kerr

Baneful indeed is the scourge of war.

--Stephen Grellet

The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.

--Rebecca Latimer Felton

Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.

--Frieda Lawrence

A nation's ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability.

--Frank Whittle

War is organized murder, and nothing else.

--Harry Patch

Retreat is brave when you steal a great prize from your enemy's hands.

--David Bowles

Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

--Robert Oppenheimer

Wars are not fought only by childless men.

--Robert Rodat

War is something of man's own fostering, and if all mankind renounces it, then it is no longer there.

--A.A. Milne

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

--A.J.P. Taylor

No war is inevitable until it breaks out.

--A.J.P. Taylor

Making peace is harder than making war.

--Adlai E. Stevenson

Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.

--Al McGuire

A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

--Albert Pike

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

--Alfred Adler

To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

--Alfred Adler

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

--Alphonse de Lamartine

There are not fifty ways of fighting, there's only one, and that's to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.

--Andre Malraux

War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.

--Andre Malraux

War is costly; peace is priceless.

--Anonymous

Hell no, we won't go!

--Anonymous

Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much!

--Aristophanes

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

--Arthur Koestler

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

--Barbara W. Tuchman

A rational army would run away.

--Montesquieu

An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.

--Montesquieu

The Atomic Age is here to stay -- but are we?

--Bennett Cerf

I do not want to see perpetual warfare in the Middle East.

--Bernie Sanders

Bloodless revolutions are rare.

--Bill Maher

The principal cause of war is war itself.

--C. Wright Mills

Warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. Terror must never be answered with terror.

--Caleb Carr

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

--Carl Sandburg

War is the province of danger.

--Carl von Clausewitz

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

--Carl von Clausewitz

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

--Carl von Clausewitz

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

--Carl von Clausewitz

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

--Carl von Clausewitz

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

--Carl von Clausewitz

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

--Carl von Clausewitz

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

--Carl von Clausewitz

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

--Charles Caleb Colton

When forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law, peace is considered already broken.

--Che Guevara

War can be avoided, and it ought to be avoided. I want no war.

--Chief Joseph

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

--Chris Hedges

A fight is mental, not just physical and psychological warfare is absolutely part of that.

--Conor McGregor

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

--Cormac McCarthy

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

--Demosthenes

Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose.

--Dick Cheney

The battlefields of any war changes a person forever.

--E.A. Bucchianeri

Wars of pen and ink often lead to wars of cannon and bayonets.

--Edward Counsel

Even a successful war is a loss to most families.

--Edward Counsel

Want is both parent and child of war.

--Edward Counsel

War is a severe doctor; but it sometimes heals grievances.

--Edward Counsel

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

--Edward R. Murrow

All the gods are dead except the god of war.

--Eldridge Cleaver

Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.

--Elias Canetti

Is war a sin?

--Elizabeth Berg

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

--Emmeline Pankhurst

A hospital alone shows what war is.

--Erich Maria Remarque

I'd never want my muse to be a singer of nothing but disaster.

--Euripides

Ares (The God of War) hates those who hesitate.

--Euripides

Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.

--Euripides

It simply is not true that war never settles anything.

--Felix Frankfurter

War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.

--Frank Herbert

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

--Frank Herbert

Longer Version:

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.


War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

--George Herbert

When you play a game of thrones you win or you die.

--George R.R. Martin

There is a savage beast in every man, and when you hand that man a sword or spear and send him forth to war, the beast stirs.

--George R.R. Martin

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.

--George Steiner

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

--Gertrude Stein

To invent a war means that you've become a wartime president, and you can suspend much if not all of the Bill of Rights.

--Gore Vidal

War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.

--Hannah Arendt

War's tragedy is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

--Havelock Ellis

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

--Herbert Hoover

War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character.

--Herman Melville

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

--Herodotus

Even the bravest cannot fight beyond his power.

--Homer

It is not right to exult over slain men.

--Homer

Let my country die for me.

--James Joyce

Peace is the happy natural state of man; war is corruption and disgrace.

--James Thomson

If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.

--Jeannette Rankin
soldier walking on wooden pathway surrounded with barbwire selective focus photography

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