War Quotes

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
~Abraham Lincoln

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
~Abraham Lincoln

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.
~A. J. P. Taylor

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.
~Benjamin Franklin

A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.
~Benjamin Franklin

Either man will abolish war, or war will abolish man.
~Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right, only who is left.
~Bertrand Russell


Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man has a right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has quarrel with mine, although I have none with him?
~Blaise Pascal

Blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed.
~Bruce Springsteen

Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.
~Charles V of France

After victory, you have more enemies.
~Cicero

You cannot be on one hand dedicated to peace and on the other dedicated to violence. Those two things are irreconcilable.
~Condoleeza Rice

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
~Ernest Hemingway

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
~General Douglas MacArthur

I believe that the entire effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war as a method of the solution of problems between nations.
~General Douglas MacArthur

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood...War is hell.
~General William Tecumseh Sherman

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
~George Orwell

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
~George Orwell

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
~George Orwell

I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.
~George W. Bush

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.
~James Madison

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
~James Madison

Man was/is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they.
~Jean Jaques Rousseau

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
~Jimmy Carter

The coward threatens when he is safe.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.
~John F. Kennedy

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
~John F. Kennedy

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
~Mahatma Gandhi

An eye for an eye makes us all blind.
~Mahatma Gandhi

We have guided missiles and misguided men.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind. In the long run, the sword is always defeated by the mind.
~Napoleon Bonaparte

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
~Noam Chomsky


Either war is obsolete, or men are.
~R. Buckminster Fuller

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.
~Senator John McCain

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
~Sigmund Freud

If you kill one person you are a murderer. If you kill ten people you are a monster. If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero.
~Vassilis Epaminondou

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~Voltaire

The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.
~William Colby, former CIA director

The greatest crime since World War II has been US foreign policy.
~William Ramsey Clark