War quotes

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Sun Tzu

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.
Sun Tzu

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.
– Norman Schwarzkopf

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Sun Tzu

In war, you can only be killed once, but in politics, many times.
Winston Churchill

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.
– Heraclitus

To hold a pen is to be at war.
Voltaire

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Mao Zedong

An army marches on its stomach.
Napoleon Bonaparte

We tried war, we tried aggression, we tried intervention. None of it works. Why don’t we try peace, as a science of human relations, not as some vague notion – as everyday work.
– Dennis Kucinich

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.
John Kerry

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
Donald Trump

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
John F. Kennedy

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Winston Churchill

A war with Pakistan would be an utter disaster.
Noam Chomsky

The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.
– Larry Elder

We’re no longer in the Cold War. Eavesdropping on friends is unacceptable.
Vladimir Putin

I can testify to what UNICEF means to children because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II.
Audrey Hepburn

Quickness is the essence of the war.
Sun Tzu

So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier.
– Rick Warren

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
Ernest Hemingway

The idea that a war can be won by standing on the defensive and waiting for the enemy to attack is a dangerous fallacy, which owes its inception to the desire to evade the price of victory.
– Douglas Haig

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
John F Kennedy

The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
– Douglas MacArthur

You can’t ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can’t repeal human nature.
– Robert Harris

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Leo Tolstoy

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
George Orwell

We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.
Warren Buffett

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.
Benjamin Franklin

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.
– George McGovern

The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.
George Washington

When I was in the White House, I was confronted with the challenge of the Cold War. Both the Soviet Union and I had 30,000 nuclear weapons that could destroy the entire earth and I had to maintain the peace.
Jimmy Carter

We make war that we may live in peace.
Aristotle

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.
Susan B. Anthony

There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu

There are only two sides to this question. Every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war; only patriots and traitors.
– Stephen Douglas

Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
Ernest Hemingway

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.
George Washington

The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
Napoleon Bonaparte

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
Richard Nixon

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.
– Virginia Postrel

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.
Sun Tzu

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.
Stephen Hawking

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.
– Amity Shlaes

War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.
Mao Zedong

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.
– Douglas MacArthur