Top 1200 Good War Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.

I've only ever played 'God of War' while we were shooting it. I've seen a lot of the videos, but while we were shooting 'God of War,' they had a green room for the actors to hang out in, and they always had the newest game on the big screen. So we'd sit there playing 'God of War' to get us into the mood.

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

I can understand why mankind hasn't given up war. During a war you get to drive tanks through the sides of buildings and shoot foreigners - two things that are usually frowned on during peacetime.

We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.

I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace.

For as long as men and women have talked about war, they have talked about it in terms of right and wrong. And for almost as long, some among them have derided such talk, called it a charade, insisted that war lies beyond (or beneath) moral judgment. War is a world apart, where life itself is at stake, where human nature is reduced to its elemental forms, where self-interest and necessity prevail. Here men and women do what they must to save themselves and their communities, and morality and law have no place. Inter arma silent leges: in time of war the law is silent.

I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility today. How could you have one if one of its features would be several cities lying in ruins, several cities where many, many thousands of people would be dead and injured and mangled, the transportation systems destroyed, sanitation implements and systems all gone? That isn't preventive war; that is war.

Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory-not prolonged indecision.

Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over.

Life is war, and marriage provides us with a close and intimate ally with whom we may wage this war. The battle requires bold love, forgiveness, confrontation, and repentance.

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!

War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.

Government acquisition of food supplies in time of war is no less important than conscription. Equity is the fundamental principle applicable to both these essential phases of war administration.

No military timetable should compel war when a successful outcome, namely a disarmed Iraq may be feasible without war, for example by allowing more time to the UN inspectors.

War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. ... war is the realm of chance. No other human activity gives it greater scope; no other has such incessant and varied dealings with this intruder. Chance makes everything more uncertain and interferes with the whole course of events.

People would always say horror movies always thrive during times of war; that's just what people would say. And I don't know if they thrived during World War II or Vietnam, but I thought that's kind of strange, why would that happen. I don't know if people rearrange their priorities; in good times, they freak out and start pointing the fingers at video games and TV, but when horrible things are happening in the world, a horror movie just seems a little ridiculous.

It is the responsibility of all of us to remind governments of their commitments to settle disputes by peaceful means and to negotiate in good faith under the UN Charter, and to denounce war agitation particularly by the media.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

As is true with respect to other great evils, the measures by which war might be made altogether impossible for the future may well be worse than even war itself.

To make a film is easy; to make a good film is war. To make a very good film is a miracle.

Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.

You have not been mistaken in supposing my views and feeling to be in favor of the abolition of war. Of my dispos[i]tion to maintain peace until its condition shall be made less tolerable than that of war itself, the world has had proofs, and more, perhaps, than it has approved. I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the dispos[i]tion to war; but of its abolition I despair.

Wars between states and people seem to have existed under all historical systems for as long as we have some recorded evidence. War is quite clearly not a phenomenon particular to the modern world-system. On the other hand, once again the technological achievements of capitalist civilization serve as much ill as good. One bomb in Hiroshima killed more people than whole wars in pre-modern times. Alexander the Great in his whole sweep of the Middle East could not compare in destructiveness to the impact of the Gulf War on Iraq and Kuwait.

I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.

If all Europe lies flat while the Russian mob tramps over it, we will then be faced with a war under difficult circumstances, and with a very good chance of losing it.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

I've learned that courage and compassion are two sides of the same coin, and that every warrior, every humanitarian, every citizen is built to live with both. In fact, to win a war, to create peace, to save a life, or just to live a good life requires of us - of every one of us - that we be both good and strong.

We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad.

I spoke to Sean Hannity, which everybody refuses to call Sean Hannity. I had numerous conversations with Sean Hannity at Fox. And Sean Hannity said - and he called me the other day - and I spoke to him about [war in Iraq] - he said you were totally against the war, because he was for the war.

War is only glorious when you buy it in the Daily Mail and enjoy it at the breakfast table. It goes splendidly with bacon and eggs. Real war is the final limit of damnable brutality, and that’s all there is in it.

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

So, being a good man is not an exam or a qualification, it changes, and it incorporates being a good friend, a good father, a good employee, a good boss, a good neighbour and a good citizen.

Around the time President Lyndon B. Johnson was declaring a War on Poverty in the 1960s, federal, state and local governments began accelerating a veritable War on the Private Sector.

Turkish-American relations are based on very strong foundations. Currently, we have a war in the region, which could not be prevented, unfortunately. We hope it is a short war ... with minimum casualties.

A state may launch a pre-emptive strike if it has very good reason for thinking that another state is preparing for war.

What's going on in Russia is not that the public is homophobic, but that the Kremlin has unleashed a war. You don't fight a war by distributing well-meaning books about how the other side really isn't so bad.

I'm working at trying to be a Christian, and that's serious business. It's like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy: it's serious business.

The redeeming feature of war is that it puts a nation to the test. As exposure to the atmosphere reduces all mummies to instant dissolution, so war passes supreme judgment upon social systems that have outlived their vitality.

I'm working at trying to be a Christian, and that's serious business. It's like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy - it's serious business.

I haven't been to a gas station in years. It feels so good not to be a slave to gas, playing the whole game of war for oil.

I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about.

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view.

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.

What is interesting is that, although it is framed as a war between the elites and Main Street, the Tea Party is actually really good for the elites.

We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analysing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.

Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.

The generation which lived through the Second World War is disappearing. Post-war generations see Europe's great achievements - liberty, peace and prosperity - as a given.

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Tony Blair is a war criminal, and I think he should be tried as a war criminal. Then I see Bono and him as pals, and I'm going, 'I don't like that.' Do I think George Bush is a war criminal? Probably - but the difference between him and Tony Blair is that Blair is intelligent. So, he has no excuse.

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence- knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn't seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn't at all great for business.

I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.