War Quotes

One of the universal rules of happiness is: always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand Come, let me clutch thee. I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat - Oppressed brain.

William Shakespeare

It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

Enrico Fermi

The outcome of the war is in our hands; the outcome of words is in the council.

Homer, The Iliad

Love has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Antoine de Saint - Exupery

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway

The greatest giver of alms is cowardice.

F. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Rebecca West

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.

Blaise Pascal

As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.

Donald E. Knuth

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems - - Not people; to focus your energies on answers - - Not excuses.

William Arthur Ward

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality... the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde

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

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a great distance, not by virtue of any sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

Bernard of Chartres, 12th Century

Having had to encounter single - Handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

Joseph Conrad

If a sufficient number of people who wanted to stop war really did gather together, they would first of all begin by making war upon those who disagreed with them. And it is still more certain that they would make war on people who also want to stop wars but in another way.

Gurdjieff

I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Edith Cavell, last words, before her execution by the Germans, 12 October 1915.

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

John Andrew Holmes

Ginger Rodgers did everything Fred Astair did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

Faith Whittlesey

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non - Conformist.

Ayn Rand

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (Harcourt)

All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this Act as if it were impossible to fail. That is the talisman, the formula, the command of right - About - Face which turns us from failure towards success.

Dorthea Bragg

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

Become aware of internal, subjective subverbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc., with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hither unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

Abraham Harold Maslow

Motivation is an external, temporary high that PUSHES you forward. Inspiration is a sustainable internal glow which PULLS you forward.

Thomas Leonard

Happiness is not a reward - It is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - It is a result.

Robert Green Ingersoll

If men want to oppose war, it is *statism* that they must oppose.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal p. 42

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Joseph Conrad

War is hell, and I mean to make it so.

William Tecumseh Sherman

Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.

Woody Allen, Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, page 71

To become aware of the possiblity of the search is to be onto something.

Walker Percy

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Baruch Spinoza

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

I am about to put foward some major ideas they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

Marquis de Sade