Famous War Quotes

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his"

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets"

Voltaire, Writer

"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon"

Napoleon Bonaparte, Leader

"If we don't end war, war will end us"

H.G. Wells, Author

"We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars"

Anatole Broyard, Critic

"War would end if the dead could return"

Stanley Baldwin, Statesman

"An unjust peace is better than a just war"

Cicero, Philosopher

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one"

Albert Einstein, Physicist

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

"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, President

"We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

"Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind"

John F. Kennedy, President

"There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others"

Niccolo Machiavelli, Writer

"John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war"

Isaac Asimov, Scientist

"Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime"

Ernest Hemingway, Novelist

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

Herbert Hoover, President

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder"

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet

"In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield"

Douglas MacArthur, Soldier

"It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war"

Lester B. Pearson, Politician

"One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it"

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Dramatist

"No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time"

Henry A. Kissinger, Statesman

"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare"

Sun Tzu, Philosopher

"All war is deception"

Sun Tzu, Philosopher

"The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war"

William Tecumseh Sherman, Soldier

"I have never advocated war except as a means of peace"

Ulysses S. Grant, President

"War is the unfolding of miscalculations"

Barbara Tuchman, Historian

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy"

John Adams, President

"The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully"

Charles Evans Hughes, Judge

"If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?"

Joan Baez, Musician

"I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy"

William Westmoreland, Soldier

"It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash"

Fred Woodworth

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

Herodotus, Historian

"The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars"

William Westmoreland, Soldier

"The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation"

George McGovern, Politician