War Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings

135 War Quotes
“Instead of breaking that bridge, we should, if possible, provide another, that he may retire the sooner out of Europe.”
Aristides ("The Just") Quotes
Source: referring to proposal to destroy Xerxes' bridge of ships over the Hellespont
“We make war that we may live in peace.”
Aristides ("The Just") Quotes
Source: referring to proposal to destroy Xerxes' bridge of ships over the Hellespont
“If I am asked what we are fighting for, I can reply in two sentences. In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation . . . an obligation of honor which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed in defiance of international good faith at the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.”
Rt. Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith Quotes
Source: Statement, to House of Commons, Declaration of War with Germany, Aug. 4, 1914
“They shall not pass till the stars be darkened: Two swords crossed in front of the Hun; Never a groan but God has harkened, Counting their cruelties one by one.”
Katharine Lee Bates Quotes
Source: Crossed Swords
“O great corrector of enormous times, Shaker of o'er-rank states, thou grand decider Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood The earth when it is sick, and curest the world O' the pleurisy of people.”
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Quotes
Source: The Two Noble Kinsmen (act V, sc. 1)
“All quiet along the Potomac they say Except now and then a stray picket Is shot as he walks on his beat, to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket.”
Ethel Lynn Beers (Ethelinda Eliot) Quotes
Source: The Picket Guard
“She is a wall of brass; You shall not pass! You shall not pass! Spring up like Summer grass, Surge at her, mass on mass, Still shall you break like glass, Splinter and break like shivered glass, But pass? You shall not pass!”
Harold Begbie (used pseudonym "A Gentleman with a Duster") Quotes
Source: You Shall Not Pass, in the New York "Tribune"
“Carry on, carry on, for the men and boys are gone, But the furrow shan't lie fallow while the women carry on.”
Janet Begbie Quotes
Source: Carry On
“Gaily! gaily! close our ranks! Arm! Advance! Hope of France! Gaily! gaily! closed our ranks! Onward! Onward! Gauls and Franks!”
Pierre Jean de Beranger Quotes
Source: Les Gaulois et Francois, (C.L. Bett's translation)
“The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.”
Friedrich von Bernhardi Quotes
Source: Germany and the next War (ch. I)
“All's fair in love and war.”
Francis Edward Smedley Quotes
“The history of those who shed those other tears, the history of those anonymous millions, is what Terkel wants readers and listeners to come away with. What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time.”
Studs Terkel Quotes
“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.”
Thucydides Quotes
“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima.... The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”
Harry S. Truman Quotes
“When every autumn people said it could not last through the winter, and when every spring there was still no end in sight, only the hope that out of it all some good would accrue to mankind kept men and nations fighting. When at last it was over, the war had many diverse results and one dominant one transcending all others: disillusion.”
Barbara Tuchman Quotes
“And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars — all over Europe, all over the world. 'Sometimes in the private interest of royal families,' Satan said, 'sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose — there is no such war in the history of the race.”
Mark Twain Quotes
“To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.”
Tzu Sun Quotes
“Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.”
Anonymous Quotes
“In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.”
Anonymous Quotes
“Never advise anyone to go to war or to get married.”
Abigail Van Buren Quotes
“The day when nobody comes back from a war it will be because the war has at last been properly organized.”
Thomas Vian Quotes
“You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that the wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freashly shaved faces, it was a shock. 'My God, my God —' I said to myself, 'it's the Children's Crusade.'”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Quotes
“It was necessary for us to discover greater powers of destruction than our enemies. We did. But after every war we have followed through with a new rise in our standard of living by the application of war-taught knowledge for the benefit of the world. It will be the same with the atomic bomb principles.”
Thomas J. Watson Quotes
“We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.”
Alan Watts Quotes
“'What war?' said the Prime Minister sharply. 'No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I'll be damned,' he said defiantly, 'if they shall have a war without consulting me. What's a cabinet for, if there's not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for anyway?'”
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh Quotes
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