A confrontation between two or more parties that is fought for land, resources, power, etc. is referred to as a war.
Top 10 War Quotes
Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later. ~ Benjamin Franklin.
The sinews of war are infinite money. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero.
War is failure of diplomacy. ~ John Dingell.
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. ~ Francois Fenelon.
In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
War makes strange bedfellows. ~ Helen Thomas.
War is sweet to those who have not experienced it. ~ Desiderius Erasmus.
If we don’t end war, war will end us. ~ H. G. Wells.
I have never advocated war except as a means of peace. ~ Ulysses S. Grant.
There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare. ~ Sun Tzu.
Awesome War Quotes
War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always. ~ Sophocles.
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. ~ Omar N. Bradley.
But when will our leaders learn – war is not the answer. ~ Helen Thomas.
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. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman.
Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories. ~ Sun Tzu.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. ~ Douglas MacArthur.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~ Thomas Mann.
War is the science of destruction. ~ John Abbott.
All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. ~ Benjamin Franklin.
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers. ~ Jose Narosky.
A mind at peace does not engender wars. ~ Sophocles.
War hath no fury like a non-combatant. ~ C. E. Montague.
Sometimes you have to pick the gun up to put the gun down. ~ Malcolm X.
Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars. ~ Haruki Murakami.
Thought Provoking War Quotes
Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard. ~ Henry Ford.
War is a severe doctor; but it sometimes heals grievances. ~ Edward Counsel.
Armies are not bad things in themselves; it’s war that’s evil. ~ Juan Gomez-Jurado.
War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. ~ Thomas Hardy.
A righteous war is a legacy from heaven – oftentimes the handmaid of a nation’s liberty. ~ Edward Counsel.
A war undertaken without sufficient monies has but a wisp of force. Coins are the very sinews of battles. ~ Francois Rabelais.
War demands sacrifice of the people. It gives only suffering in return. ~ Frederic Clemson Howe.
War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. ~ Winston Churchill.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ~ George Orwell.
There never was a good war, or a bad peace. ~ Benjamin Franklin.
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. ~ Sun Tzu.
One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned. ~ Howard Zinn.
War can only be abolished through war … in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun. ~ Mao Zedong.
The power of making war often prevents it. ~ Thomas Jefferson.
War settles nothing. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Peace is the short interval when nations toil to pay the costs of past and future wars. ~ Herbert V. Prochnow.
War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it. ~ Benito Mussolini.
When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre.
Short of changing human nature … the only way to achieve a practical, livable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war. ~ Richard Nixon.
The nation having the strongest war footing can easily find an excuse for going to war. ~ Lewis F. Korns.
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children. ~ Jimmy Carter.
Best War Quotes
War remains the decisive human failure. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith.
If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how? ~ Joan Baez.
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. ~ Herbert Hoover.
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come. ~ Carl Sandburg.
You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte.
In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers. ~ Neville Chamberlain.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman.
Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war. ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca.
War would end if the dead could return. ~ Stanley Baldwin.
It is not patriotic to commit young Americans to war unless our national security clearly requires it. ~ George McGovern.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography. ~ Mark Twain.
Popular War Quotes
Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. ~ Salvador Dali.
When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin. ~ Winston Churchill.
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. ~ John Adams.
The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it. ~ John Randolph.
In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash. ~ Douglas MacArthur.
It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it. ~ Robert E. Lee.
To win this war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern. ~ Sarah Palin.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war. ~ Plato.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
Famous War Quotes
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. ~ George S. Patton.
War is a defeat for humanity. ~ Pope John Paul II.
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman.
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory. ~ Albert Pike.
War is fear cloaked in courage. ~ William Westmoreland.
We don’t even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome. ~ Isabel Allende.
War makes thieves and peace hangs them. ~ George Herbert.
More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginnings of all wars. ~ Franklin Roosevelt.
War does not determine who is right – only who is left. ~ Bertrand Russell.
War is a game played with a smiling face, but do you think there is laughter in my heart? ~ Winston Churchill.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. ~ George Orwell.
It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash. ~ Fred Woodworth.
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. ~ Albert Einstein.
Great War Quotes
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.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. ~ Voltaire.
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche.
Our soldiers fought in the Korean War to push back communism. As a result of their effort and the effort of our allies, South Korea is free today. ~ Pierre Poilievre.
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. ~ Baruch Spinoza.
This is the nature of war: it turns us into enemies. People who have never met kill each other out of fear. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh.
It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war. ~ Lester B. Pearson.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. ~ Howard Zinn.
War is what happens when language fails. ~ Margaret Atwood.
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace. ~ Jeane Kirkpatrick.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ~ Sun Tzu.
Wars are caused by undefended wealth. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower.
There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli.
If it were a fact, it wouldn’t be called intelligence. ~ Donald Rumsfeld.
Wise War Quotes
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. ~ Sun Tzu.
War is never a lasting solution for any problem. ~ A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.
It is not only the living who are killed in war. ~ Isaac Asimov.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace. ~ George Washington.
An unjust peace is better than a just war. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero.
Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed. ~ Harlan Coben.
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. ~ John Stuart Mill.
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. ~ Jeannette Rankin.
What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party. ~ Henry David Thoreau.
The power to wage war is the power to wage war successfully. ~ Charles Evans Hughes.
War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle. ~ Gilbert Parker.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. ~ Carl von Clausewitz.
A bad peace is even worse than war. ~ Tacitus.
War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man. ~ Napoleon Hill.
If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. ~ Leo Tolstoy.
There was never a good war, or a bad peace. ~ Benjamin Franklin.
The first casualty when war comes is truth. ~ Hiram Johnson.
Powerful War Quotes
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. ~ Norman Schwarzkopf.
Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind. ~ John F. Kennedy.
All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal. ~ John Steinbeck.
An army marches on its stomach. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte.
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars. ~ William Westmoreland.
Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ John Adams.
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous. ~ George Bernard Shaw.
Short War Quotes
War is hell. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman.
All warfare is based on deception. Unknown War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
War has rules, mud wrestling has rules – politics has no rules. ~ Ross Perot.
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed. ~ Mao Zedong.
We make war that we may live in peace. ~ Aristotle.
If men do not now succeed in abolishing war, civilization and mankind are doomed. ~ Ludwig von Mises.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war. ~ Ernest Hemingway.
So these were the 130 top quotes on war.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Mary McLeod Bethune quotes and Anti-War quotes.
