A collection of quotes on and about war.

 

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

G.K. Chesterton

 

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” 

Plato

 

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” 

Ernest Hemingway

 

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” 

John Steinbeck

 

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” 

Leo Tolstoy

 

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

Ernest Hemingway

 

“If we don't end war, war will end us.” 

H.G. Wells

 

“You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” 

Winston Churchill

 

“Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.” 

Walt Whitman

 

“Let my country die for me.” 

James Joyce

 

“A prince must not have any other object nor any other thought… but war, its institutions, and its discipline; because that is the only art befitting one who commands.” 

Niccolo Machiavelli

 

“In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.” 

Oscar Wilde

 

“A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.” 

H.G. Wells

 

"No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theater of war."

Ambrose Bierce

 

"War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered."

Thomas De Quincey

 

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.” 

Mark Twain