Dozens of quotes about war gathered by the various author over the years. Many of them are inspirational words, wise, breathtaking, artistic, and humorous collection.
One might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
– N. Rogers (1662)
Happy nations have no history.
– Belgian (on war and peace)
God grant me a good sword and no use for it.
– Polish (on war and peace)
After the war, aid.
– Greek Proverb
United we stand, divided we fall.
– Aesop (c.620-560 BC)
Violence begets violence.
– Unknown
War ends nothing.
– Zairean (on war and peace)
War is sweet to those who haven’t experienced it.
– Latin (on war and peace)
You can’t have peace any longer than your neighbor pleases.
– Dutch (on war and peace)
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
– Mark Twain
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
– George Orwell
War is what happens when language fails.
– Margaret Atwood
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
– Albert Einstein
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
– G.K. Chesterton
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.
– Adlai E. Stevenson II
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down.
– Malcolm X
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?
– Bill Watterson
Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
– Lewis Carroll
War does not determine who is right — only who is left.
– Unknown
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.
– John Steinbeck
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
– Howard Zinn
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.
– Haruki Murakam
If you win, you need not have to explain…If you lose, you should not be there to explain!
– Adolf Hitler
There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for.
– Albert Dietrich
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
– Plato
Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.
– Herbert Hoover
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
– Voltaire
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.
– Leo Tolstoy
The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.
– Carl Sagan
No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
In times of war, the law falls silent.
– Marcus Tullius Cicero
I came, I saw, I conquered.
– Gaius Julius Caesar
How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?
– Howard Zinn
It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.
– Aristotle
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane?
– Terry Pratchett
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.
– Baltasar Gracián
Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.
– Laini Taylor
War is over… If you want it.
– John Lennon
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
– Kristin Hannah
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.
– Robert A. Heinlein
The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.
– J.R.R. Tolkien
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.
– Sun Tzu
The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
– Joseph Heller
And when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.
– Ruskin Bond
The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
– Elie Wiesel
In wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes.
– Robert Jordan
War doesn’t negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
– Khaled Hosseini
It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.
– Joseph Heller
If we don’t end war, war will end us.
– H.G. Wells
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
– Cormac McCarthy
May God have mercy for my enemies because I won’t.
– George S. Patton Jr.
Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.
– Joe Abercrombie
So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.
– Orson Scott Card
People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.
– Banksy
War is like the new boss who expects the impossible.
– Markus Zusak
One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all.
– Sun Tzu
Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause.
– Chris Hedges
What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?
– Ruta Sepetys
Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.
– George R.R. Martin
Sisters in battle, I am shield and blade to you. As I breathe, your enemies will know no sanctuary. While I live, your cause is mine.
– Leigh Bardugo
I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, Mother, what was war?
– Eve Merriam
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
– Walt Whitman
In War: Resolution,
In Defeat: Defiance,
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will.
– Winston S. Churchill
War is not for winning, It is for surviving.
– Catherynne M. Valente
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers… Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
– François Fénelon
One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.
– George W. Bush
There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.
– H. Havelock Ellis
Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.
– Sun Tzu
In war, our elders may give the orders…but it is the young who have to fight.
– T.H. White
If your enemy offers you two targets, strike at a third.
– Robert Jordan
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.
– William Faulkner
We don’t like to kill our unborn; we need them to grow up and fight our wars.
– Marilyn Manson
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
– Thomas Mann
Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
– T.H. White
Those with the least always lose the most in war.
– Joe Abercrombie
A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.
– Steven Galloway
Some victories are merely defeat wearing the wrong clothing.
– Kiersten White
I learned to play the instruments of war,” he said, “and paint in blood.
– Cassandra Clare
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
– Winston S. Churchill
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
– Jean-Paul Sartre
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
– William T. Sherman
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
– Naomi Klein
He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.
– Gabriel García Márquez
Mankind must put an end to war – or war will put an end to mankind.
– John F. Kennedy
He says we need to live in the real world, where war and death are a reality, not pretend.
– Pittacus Lore
Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
– Ronald Reagan
Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind.
– L. Ron Hubbard
There’s so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones.
– Mark Knopfler
Love is a conquest! Love is war!
– Marissa Meyer
Fear could break a line faster than any enemy charge.
– Sarah J. Maas
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
– Leon Trotsky
War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.
– T.H. White
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
– William Faulkner
