War Quotes

With malice toward none, with charity for all, ... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1865

And yesterday he would have killed me to get to his foe. But now we serve each other. Only a fool walks into the future backward.

Terry Goodkind, "Stone of Tears".

The worst thing one can do is not to try, to be aware of what one wants and not give in to it, to spend years in silent hurt wondering if something could have materialized - - Never knowing.

Jim Rohn

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Beware of dissipating your powers strive constantly to concentrate them. Genius thinks it can do whatever it sees others doing, but is sure to repent of every ill - Judged outlay.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To live happily is an inward power of the soul.

Marcus Aurelius

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old - Fashioned.

George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 2

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

John Anthony Ciardi

To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Albert Einstein

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

Silius Italicus

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Albert Einstein

Europe is spreading its wings. In freedom. In prosperity. And in peace. It is a truly proud moment for the European Union. It is a triumph for liberty and democracy. To our new members I say: ? Warmly welcome to our family?. Our new Europe is born.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, (Prime Minister of Denmark) Family photo after the European Council meeting in Copenhagen, 13 December 20

Beware of too much laughter, for it deadens the mind and produces oblivion.

The Talmud

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who would profit by the old order, only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new.

Machiavelli

History is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949)

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence scepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.

Denis Diderot

The aggressive spirit, the offensive, is the chief thing everywhere in war, and the air is no exception.

Baron Manfred von Richthofen ("Red Baron")

Each time you are honest and conduct yourself with honesty, a success force will drive you toward greater success. Each time you lie, even with a little white lie, there are strong forces pushing you toward failure.

Joseph Sugarman

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Agatha Christie

The reward for a thing well done is to have done it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Rebecca West

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterward propagate it.

Johnson

How is it possible to expect mankind to take advice when they will not so much as take warning.

Jonathan Swift

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose - Garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind.

T. S. Eliot

Self awareness is NOT just a bunch of amino acids bumping together.

Robert Anson Heinlein

Love seeks one thing only the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.

Thomas Merton

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

Carl von Clausewitz

Only a fool walks backwards into the future.

Terry Goodkind

Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.

Margaret Mead

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

Herbert Butterfield

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon - No alternative.

Golda Mei

It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn.

Sue Grafton

Show me an objective worthy of war and I will go along with you.

Otto Von Bismarck

Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

He who cannot rest, cannot work he who cannot let go, cannot hold on he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.

Richard Willard Armou