These war quotes will inspire you. War is a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging war quotes, war sayings, and war proverbs.
Famous War Quotes
- “All the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies, and hatred comes invariably from people who are not fighting.” ~ George Orwell
- “I hate war… for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.” ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick
- “There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
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“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” ~ Plato
- “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Naturally, the common people don’t want war … but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” ~ Hermann Goring
- “Swift as the wind. Quiet as the forest. Conquer like the fire. Steady as the mountain” ~ Sun Tzu
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“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” ~ George S. Patton
- “It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.” ~ H. G. Wells
- “Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.” ~ Winston Churchill
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“In war, truth is the first casualty.” ~ Aeschylus
- “We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.” ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick
- “War does not determine who is right – only who is left.” ~ Bertrand Russell
- “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ~ Albert Einstein
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“The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” ~ Tacitus
- “The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
- “We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war.” ~ Mao Zedong
- “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.” ~ George Orwell
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“There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy.” ~ George Washington
- “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
- “War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.” ~ Frank Herbert
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“Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” ~ James Madison
- “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ~ Albert Einstein
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“An empire founded by war has to maintain itself by war.” ~ Baron de Montesquieu
- “Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “War is the only game in which both sides lose.” ~ Walter Scott
- “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ~ Sun Tzu
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“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.” ~ George McGovern
- “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” ~ Thomas Paine
- “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.” ~ Albert Camus
- “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.” ~ Otto von Bismarck
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“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” ~ George Orwell
- “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “If we don’t end war, war will end us.” ~ H. G. Wells
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“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.” ~ Abbie Hoffman
- “War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.” ~ Alfred Adler
- “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.” ~ Sigmund Freud
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“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” ~ James Madison
- “Providence is always on the side of the last reserve.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “War is the business of barbarians.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
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“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die.” ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
- “War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.” ~ Martin Luther
- “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.” ~ Albert Camus
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“Wars are the hobbies of half-informed children who have somehow come into possession of the levers of power.” ~ Fred Reed
- “Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.” ~ James Madison
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“War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.” ~ Albert Pike
- “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.” ~ Jimmy Carter
- “Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals?” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” ~ Ronald Reagan
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“War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men.” ~ Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
- “Where is the indignation about the fact that the US and USSR have thirty thousand pounds of destructive force for every human being in the world?” ~ Norman Cousins
- “The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.” ~ David Hume
- “No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
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“Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.” ~ Kin Hubbard
- “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
