Quotes on Great War

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

At all times, except when a monarch could enforce his will, war has been facilitated by the fact that vigorous males, confident of victory, enjoyed it, while their females admired them for their prowess.

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

Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight, you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life, infecting Congress, the courts, the policeman on the beat, the man in the street.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

My first wish is, to see this plague of mankind banished from the earth, and the sons and daughters of this world employed in more pleasing and innocent amusements, than in preparing implements, and exercising them, for the destruction of mankind.

Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.

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

No mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology.

Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

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

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat for it is momentary.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

This world of ours... must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle

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.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. In my opinion, there never was a good war or a bad peace. When will mankind be convinced and agree to settle their difficulties by arbitration?