Best War Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway.”

“War is a contagion.”

“The reliability of the United States was not a serious problem during the Cold War, because the Soviet threat provided a powerful incentive for the United States to protect its allies, who were too weak to defend themselves.”

“The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.”

“I looked back on the roaring Twenties - with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby,' and the pre-Code films - as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.”

“No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”

“If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.”

“War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.”

“I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.”

“I always tell people, anger is like liquid. It's fluid, it's like water. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container.”

“As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.”

“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.”

“The guys who won World War II and that whole generation have disappeared, and now we have a bunch of teenage twits.”

“There is certainly a longstanding idea within western culture that civilization is only a thin veneer. As soon as something happens, say a war or a natural disaster or an epidemic like we're going through right now, the worst comes out in each of us.”

“War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.”

“Something is wanting, and something must be done, or we shall be involved in all the horror of failure, and civil war without a prospect of its termination.”

“The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.”

“War itself is the enemy of the human race.”

“One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you'd see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.”

“Geopolitical drama lessened but did not die after the Cold War; in 2008, the specter of thousands of seeming automatons banging drums at the opening of the Beijing Games frightened and enthralled the world, reminding us that China was a nation on the rise, a competitor for global dominance.”

“War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.”

“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.”

“Given its Internet sophistication and the attraction the group has with vast numbers of potential recruits from among disaffected populations around the globe, ISIS has the realistic potential to eventually swell its ranks of jihadists waging a 'holy war' to hundreds of thousands in both the western and eastern hemispheres.”

“All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.”

“It is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.”

“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”

“Since the Gulf War, since the new World Order, America is now the number one arms dealer in the world.”

“The Arabs are looking forward to developing their region, which the long years of war had prevented from finding its true place in today's world, in an atmosphere of democracy, pluralism, and prosperity.”

“When I was a youngster growing up in South Dakota, we never referred to the national debt, it was always referred to as the war debt because it stemmed from World War I.”

“I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.”

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

“In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity.”

“War is never a lasting solution for any problem.”

“So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.”

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

“The Korean War has also show quite clearly that in a major conflict manpower is as important as horsepower.”

“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.”

“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”

“I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.”

“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.”

“Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.”

“Rights compliance helps effective outcomes, it does not hinder them. That should come as no surprise because the 'human rights' in the Human Rights Act are the rights adopted in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war, and are designed to protect all of us from oppression.”

“I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.”

“It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”

“What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.”

“One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.”

“I think a lot of Americans have never been all that hungry. They've never had war on their shore, and they've never suffered the way other cultures have suffered. I'm not saying we should go suffer. Not at all. I'm saying we should be more aware of how other cultures exist.”

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”

“I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.”

“The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

“After every major conflict - World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the Soviet Union - what happened was that we ultimately hollowed out the force, largely by doing deep across-the-board cuts.”

“When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.”

“The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.”

“Many foolish people believe that nuclear war cannot happen, because there can be no winner. However, the American war planners, who elevated U.S. nuclear weapons from a retaliatory role to a pre-emptive first strike function, obviously do not agree that nuclear war cannot be won.”

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.”

“Let us wage a moral and political war against the billionaires and corporate leaders, on Wall Street and elsewhere, whose policies and greed are destroying the middle class of America.”

“I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.”

“I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.”

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

“Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.”

“Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”

“The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.”

“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”

“The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.”

“I have not yet begun to fight!”

“Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.”

“So one important lesson of Vietnam is, the first casualty of an unwise and unjust war are the American troops called on to fight it. Their service should be honored.”

“I will not play tug o' war. I'd rather play hug o' war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.”

“The Boxer Rebellion is a war that was fought on Chinese soil in the year 1900. The Europeans, the Japanese and their Chinese Christian allies were on one side. On the other were poor, starving, illiterate Chinese teenagers whom the Europeans referred to as the Boxers.”

“No war is inevitable until it breaks out.”

“It is not only the living who are killed in war.”

“It's a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided.”

“Enforcement is the long overdue step to protect our Nation from external threats in a time of war. And then once we do that, we can effectively discuss a guest worker program.”

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

“In the aftermath of the second world war, nations came together to say 'never again.' They established the United Nations and agreed a simple set of universal standards of decency for mankind to cling to: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

“What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.”

“It's impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.”

“In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.”

“I like to think that I probably have written more World War II music than anyone on the planet after all the 'Medal of Honors' and 'Call of Duties.'”

“Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”

“The first lesson is that you can't lose a war if you have command of the air, and you can't win a war if you haven't.”

“After its defeat in the Second World War, Japan, unlike Germany, failed to show true contrition or give a fulsome apology, though it showered its neighbours, including China, with generous economic assistance. Only in 1995 did it finally offer an apology, but this was of the most limited and formulaic kind.”

“I've said it before: War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds on the grounds that dachshunds were 'German dogs.' They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds.”

“Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won.”

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!”

“These days, our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending, escalating war and violence.”

“World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.”

“Speaking as somebody who is half English and half Hungarian, World War I still seems to me a familiar and seismic event, as if it had only just ended.”

“In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense.”

“I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.”

“War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.”

“I served in World War II in our fight to defeat fascism.”

“This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.”

“I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.”

“But when will our leaders learn - war is not the answer.”

“There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.”

“The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.”

“Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.”

“It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.”

“No one has the right to ignite a war and lead an occupation and armies to conquer people, invading them and make them suffer all kinds of torture, murder, expulsion, displacement, bombing and terrorism by different lethal prohibited weapons and then come and speak as the savior of the people or a defender of their rights.”