Quotes about war

Heard so oft

In worst extremes, and on the perilous edge

Of battle.

My sentence is for open War; Of Wiles,

More unexpert, I boast not: them let those

Contrive who need, or when they need, not now.

For while they sit contriving, shall the rest,

Millions that stand in Arms, and longing wait

The Signal to ascend, sit ling'ring here,

Heav'n's fugitives, and for their dwelling place

Accept this dark opprobrious Den of shame,

The Prison of his Tyranny who Reigns

By our delay? no, let us rather choose,

Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once

O'er Heaven's high Tow'rs to force resistless way,

Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms

Against the Torturer.

[C]aution and vigilance are the most important lessons of the art of war.

There is no surer proof of the military skill of the Romans, than their first surmounting the idle terror, and afterwards disdaining the dangerous use, of elephants in war.

Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants — the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare from becoming a mere lower-class brawl.

“That was the time to begin all-out preparations for war.”

“On the contrary. That was the time to begin all-out prevention of war.”

First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause.

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

Nonsense. You are a military man and should know better. If there is one science into which man has probed continuously and successfully, it is that of military technology. No potential weapon would remain unrealized for ten thousand years.

Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

Kolya believed that the Mongols’ expansion was pathological. It was a ghastly spiral of positive feedback, born of Genghis Khan’s unquestioned military genius and fueled by easy conquests, a plague of insanity and destruction that had spread across most of the known world.

Of course, we in the so-called developed countries thought we were civilized. At least war wasn't respectable any more, and the United Nations was always doing its best to stop the wars that did break out.' 'Not very successfully: I'd give it about three out of ten...'