These wartime quotes will inspire you. Wartime is a period during which war is in progress or is taking place.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging wartime quotes, wartime sayings, and wartime proverbs.
Best Wartime Quotes
- “One keeps healthy in wartime…by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.” ~ Randolph Bourne
- “A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.” ~ Claud Cockburn
- “Despite the vision and farseeing wisdom of our wartime heads of state, the physicists have felt the peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons. Nor can we forget that these weapons as they were in fact used dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war. In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
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“Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.” ~ Will Durant
- “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ~ Sun Tzu
- “The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.” ~ Jose Bergamin
- “All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments.” ~ William Kristol
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“Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “If we don’t end war, war will end us.” ~ H. G. Wells
- “The physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
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“The last thing I wanted to do was blow up another school.” ~ Rick Riordan
- “In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer
- “‘Feminist comedy,’ practically an oxymoron, had a couple of good years after WWII. Chalk it up to the forced female autonomy that occurred during wartime, when Rosie the Riveter went to work in the factories, constructing the Allies’ war machines while taking charge of the finances, the home, and the children.” ~ Grace Slick
- “I feel that the constitution is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peacetime and in wartime. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that Man was vile.” ~ B. R. Ambedkar
- “When I was a child – in wartime, pre-television – books were my life.” ~ A. S. Byatt
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“Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.” ~ Scott Westerfeld
- “My wartime experiences developing a code that utilized the Navajo language taught how important our Navajo culture is to our country. For me that is the central lesson: that diverse cultures can make a country richer and stronger.” ~ Chester Nez
- “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “People sometimes say we need to be really almost on a wartime footing if you want to change. Our whole economy is based on burning fossil fuels, which is taking CO2 out of the ground and putting it up into the air.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert
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“Statistics have shown that mortality increases perceptibly in the military during wartime.” ~ Alphonse Allais
- “Most of my friends’ fathers had been in the war – either as soldiers or in some other capacity in the military. Whereas my father had not fought. He was older and he was in a business that was considered essential to the wartime effort – the wire business – and, of course, I was so young I didn’t understand any of this.” ~ Paul Auster
- “I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.” ~ Shinzo Abe
- “The public is really not kept abreast, and our leaders are not clear and forthright about what the terms of engagement are right now – that we really have no choice except to undertake a wartime scale mobilization, but a mobilization knowing that we can actually fix this. It’s only a disaster if we continue to plunge headlong into the problem, which is only accelerating in spite of everything that the Democrats have been willing to say and do about it.” ~ Jill Stein
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“Living in war, and being a wartime band, I don’t think there’s any way that can’t somehow influence the songwriting.” ~ Colin Meloy
- “God has given us prayer as a wartime walkie-talkie so that we can call headquarters for everything we need as the kingdom of Christ advances in the world. Prayer gives us the significance of front-line forces, and gives God the glory of a limitless Provider. The one who gives the power gets the glory. Thus prayer safeguards the supremacy of God in missions while linking us with endless grace for every need.” ~ John Piper
- “Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the Military-Industrial Complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson
- “In any civilized society the most important task is achieving a proper balance between freedom and order. In wartime, reason and history both suggest that this balance shifts in favor… of the government’s ability to deal with conditions that threaten the national well-being.” ~ William Rehnquist
- “Life is war. That’s not all it is. But it is always that. Our weakness in prayer is owing largely to our neglect of this truth. Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief.” ~ John Piper
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“In wartime, people willing to sacrifice liberty for security.” ~ Ron Paul
- “The injustice is that women continue to be the main target of violence both during wartime and peacetime and yet there is still a lack of a public outrage.” ~ Zainab Salbi
- “One of the things I took from my wartime experiences was that reality was a stage set… the comfortable day-to-day life, school, the home where one lives and all the rest of it… could be dismantled overnight.” ~ J. G. Ballard
- “When I’m describing wartime activities or violence I don’t want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture. Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.” ~ Chang-Rae Lee
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“No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.” ~ Guy Sajer
- “Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.” ~ Ben Horowitz
- “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damages morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hung” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or Gettysburg, or Saratoga.” ~ Jim Wright
- “My decision to begin research in radio astronomy was influenced both by my wartime experience with electronics and antennas and by one of my teachers, Jack Ratcliffe, who had given an excellent course on electromagnetic theory during my final undergraduate year.” ~ Antony Hewish
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“There is no working middle course in wartime.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “The legacy of women’s war work is our present post-industrial employment structure. It was the war that created the demand for a technologically advanced, de-skilled, low-paid, non-unionized female workforce and paved the way for making part-time work the norm for married women now. A generation later, it was the daughters of wartime women workers who completed their mothers’ campaign for equal pay.” ~ Linda Grant
- “Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, ‘Enough! This is a silly way to decide who’s in charge!’ And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn’t leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.” ~ Kristin Cashore
- “My life after childhood has two main stories: the story of the hustler and the story of the rapper, and the two overlap as much as they diverge. I was on the streets for more than half of my life from the time I was thirteen years old. People sometimes say that now I’m so far away from that life – now that I’ve got businesses and Grammys and magazine covers – that I have no right to rap about it. But how distant is the story of your own life ever going to be? The feelings I had during that part of my life were burned into me like a brand. It was life during wartime.” ~ Jay-Z
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“…his wartime experience had taught him to trust his instincts, even though he’d never been sure where they’d come from.” ~ Nicholas Sparks
- “Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles… no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler’s time, even in Stalin’s time.” ~ Milan Kundera
- “Childhood depression tends to be more common in inner cities, being most frequently related to serious social deprivation, bullying, domestic violence, wartime experience and famine. It is, for example, a serious problem among children who are traumatised refugees.” ~ Robert Winston
- “George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower all rode their wartime heroics into the White House.” ~ Jeff Greenfield
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“The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
- “Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.” ~ Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
- “Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself… The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.” ~ Gloria Steinem
- “I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.” ~ Henry A. Kissinger
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“Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.” ~ Ann Coulter
- “The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.” ~ Chris Hedges
- “Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.” ~ Harry Elmer Barnes
- “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling ones pulse and taking ones temperature. I see that a speaker at the weekend said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.” ~ Winston Churchill , Wartime quotes leadership
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“In wartime we identify ourselves with the nation, and its interests are the interests of our primal selves.” ~ George H. Mead
- “Surely no rational or realistic person will discount the possibility that [during wartime] the United States might suddenly resort to nuclear weapons. Those who retain the instinct for survival, not to speak of minimal concern for their fellow man, will seek ways to act before rather than after the event.” ~ Noam Chomsky
- “Sometimes animals may suffer more because of their more limited understanding. If, for instance, we are taking prisoners in wartime we can explain to them that although they must submit to capture, search, and confinement, they will not otherwise be harmed and will be set free at the conclusion of hostilities. If we capture wild animals, however, we cannot explain that we are not threatening their lives. A wild animal cannot distinguish an attempt to overpower and confine from an attempt to kill; the one causes as much terror as the other.” ~ Peter Singer
- “My mother was a terrific force in my life. Wartime-generation woman, hadn’t gone to university but should have done. Was very funny, very verbal, very clever, very witty.” ~ Ian Hislop
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“To have a son in wartime is the worst curse that can befall a mother, no matter what anyone says.” ~ Slavenka Drakulic
- “I still think, perhaps I’m a bit old fashioned – that truth matters. I think truth matters particularly when it concerns an event of such horrendous quality. Holocaust was the worst, probably the worst massacre, if you’d like to call it that, in the world’s history – considering the scale of it and the fact that it was done deliberately during wartime.” ~ David Irving
- “The systemic incompatibility between free-market capitalism and the quality of democratic life and respect for human rights has to be modified to take account of such contextual variables as wartime, security threats, and the societal balance between entrepreneurial and working classes.” ~ Richard A. Falk
- “I feel a special kinship for our military. Because, unfortunately, I became a wartime president. And committed our military in the defense of our country to difficult assignments. I tell people all the time, I don’t miss much about being president; I do miss looking in the eyes of people who volunteered to serve. And so not only do I feel a kinship, I feel an obligation and a duty to help.” ~ George W. Bush
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“The song Some Other Time is full of emotion. In wartime, it had a tremendously poignant feeling.” ~ Betty Comden
- “I call George W. Bush a radical because he is undertaking a fundamental transformation of our Constitutional system of government and of our longstanding policies that have been accepted for literally generations. He thinks to concentrate unaccountable power in the Executive. He thinks you alter the laws so that, as Commander in Chief, he can determine, under what he says are wartime conditions, what the laws are, which laws should be enforced, and declare by fiat what our policy should be, even abrogating longstanding international treaties.” ~ Sidney Blumenthal
- “[The] government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution. The Constitution just sets minimums. Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.” ~ Antonin Scalia
