top of page
War Quotes



"The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse."


"England and Greece are friends. English blood was shed on Greek soil in the war against fascism, and Greeks gave their lives to protect English pilots."


"What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist."


"I am one of the million or more male residents of the United Kingdom, who a year ago had no special yearning towards military life, but who joined the army after war was declared."


"War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene."


"It's odd being an American now. Most of us are peaceful, but here we are again, in our fifth major war of this century."



"What is not conservative about saying, 'Don't go to war unless we go to war properly with a full declaration of war and no other way?'"


"You have indeed done much since the new century began to give shape and substance to the growing, the insistent desire that war may be banished from the earth."



"Only the man who disciplines himself strictly can stand for long the terrific pace of modern war."


"It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest."


"We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries."


"My dear Excellency! I have not gone to war to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose."


"Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will."


"I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth."



"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."


"Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind."


"Philadelphia reflected the national turmoil over race and the Vietnam War, often exploding on my watch."


"To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them."


"There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense."


"Provision was also made for the distribution of Germany's foreign assets among the Allies."


"It was necessary, we felt, to thoroughly terrify our opponents, so that even in hollow victory, they would learn to fear every sunrise ..."


"I am a Korean War veteran. I support our troops as much as anyone in this body, but I do so by advocating redeployment out of Iraq as soon as it can be safely done."


"We who came here saw what was happening. This was far more than a war in a faraway place. This was a moral imperative, a terrible vision of the future."


"The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families."


"War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms."


"We did not start a fight with America, and we don't want a war with America. If someone launches an attack, though, we will respond. We will not take rejection or humiliation. We do not want to fight."


"This is the reality of nuclear weapons: they may trigger a world war; a war which, unlike previous ones, destroys all of civilization."



"If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war."


"On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed."
bottom of page

