Quotes on War

Sweat more during peace: bleed less during war

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Once and for all the idea of glorious victories won by the glorious army must be wiped out. Niether side is glorious. On either side they're just frightened men messing their pants and they all want the same thing - not to lie under theearth, but to walk upon it - without crutches.

A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.

In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.

If, however, there is to be a war of nerves let us make sure our nerves are strong and are fortified by the deepest convictions of our hearts.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.

It may well be that we shall by a process of sublime irony have reached a state in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

There is such a thing as man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty privation and want are the school of the good soldier.

As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.