Quotes on War

If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.

Others may fashion more smoothly images of bronze (I for one believe it), evoke living faces from marble, plead causes better, trace with a wand the wanderings of the heavens and foretell the rising of stars. But you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples with power (these will be your arts); impose the habit of peace, spare the vanquished and war down the proud!

Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be.

First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.

Laurels grow in the Bay of Biscay, I hope a bed of them may be found in the Mediterranean.

War is not the answer, because only love can conquer hate.

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

**** the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!

When you kill somebody's little sister with a missile, he's going to hate you forever. And the next generation will hate you even more.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

Nothing is more useless in developing a nation's economy than a gun, and nothing blocks the road to social development more than the financial burden of war. War is the arch enemy of national progress and the modern scourge of civilized man.

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

A state of war is not a blank check... when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them?

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

Even with the best intentions, you can have a nuclear war, a nuclear holocaust, through miscalculation, through accidents.