War Quotes

Modern war has decimated many a country; but it has always spawned millions of bureaucrats. They fatten on shortages and thrive on trouble. Peace can never offer such opportunities for exercising petty tyrannies, using red tape to regiment the individual and making life generally unpleasant.

Paul Tabori, _The Natural Science of Stupidity_. (New York: ChiltonCompany, 1960), p. 104.

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against passion and your appetite.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all - Powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

Aldous Huxley

Toward the accomplishment of an aim, which in wantonness of atrocity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound. These men are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort.

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailo

The art of being yourself at your best is the art of unfolding your personality into the person you want to be.... Be gentle with yourself, learn to love yourself, to forgive yourself, for only as we have the right attitude toward ourselves can we have the right attitude toward others.

Wilfred Peterson, This Week (Oct. 1, 1961)

To live for results would be to sentence myself to continuous frustration. My only sure reward in my actions and not from them.

Hugh Prathe

The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse.

Carlos Castaneda

Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service gets great rewards.

Elbert Hubbard

It has been my experience that one cannot, in any shape or form, depend on human relations for lasting reward. It is only work that truly satisfies.

Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, 1962

Keep thy eyes wide open before marriage, and half - Shut afterwards.

Benjamin Franklin

Love and war are the same thing, and stratagems and policy are as allowable in the one as in the others.

Miguel Cerbantes

On a good day, I view the job of president as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch - Engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

A Bartlett Giamatti

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Seneca

Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.

James Thurbe

Words do two major things They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

Jim Rohn

A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.

Sren Aaby Kierkegaard

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

George Stanley McGovern

We learn our virtues from our friends who love us; our faults from the enemy who hates us. We cannot easily discover our real character from a friend. He is a mirror, on which the warmth of our breath impedes the clearness of the reflection.

Ricthe

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio address, Oct. 26, 1939

The purpose of all higher education is to make men aware of what was and what is to incite them to probe into what may be. It seeks to teach them to understand, to evaluate, to communicate.

Otto Kleppne

Wherever a set of alternative possible routes toward achieving a given end presents itself, a student movement will tend to choose the one which involves a higher measure of violence or humiliation directed against the older generation.

Lewis S Feue

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

G. Hoppe

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.

Thomas Alva Edison

Did you exchange a walk - On part in a war, for a leading role in a cage?

Pink Floyd, song "Wish You Were Here".

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two - Thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

Albert Einstein

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.

Margaret Fairless Barbe

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.

J. B. Priestley

The aggressive spirit, the offensive, is the chief thing everywhere in war, and the air is no exception.

Baron Manfred von Richthofen ("Red Baron")

Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.

John Andrew Holmes

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.

G. C. Lichtenberg

War will cease when men refuse to fight.

F. Hansen

The good devout man first makes inner preparation for the actions he has later to perform. His outward actions do not draw him into lust and vice rather it is he who bends them into the shape of reason and right judgement. Who has a stiffer battle to fight than the man who is striving to conquer himself.

Thomas a Kempis

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

George Eliot

There are two ways of resisting war: the legal way and the revolutionary way. The legal way involves the offer of alternatinve service not as a privilege for a few but as a right for all. The revolutionary view involves an uncompromising resistance, with a view to breaking the power of militarism in time of peace or the resources of the state in time of war.

Albert Einstein

When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care far more profoundly about other people. The more alert and sensitive we are to our own needs, the more loving and generaous we can be toward others.

Eda LeShan

We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sadness.

David Weatherford