Warfare Quotes
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There is no instance of a country having benefitted from prolonged warfare.
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More Warfare Quotes
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er, Dream of fighting fields no more: Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking, Morn of toil, nor night of waking.
walter scott— Walter Scott, Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto I, Stanza 31.
[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] "I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines [...] We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways."
henry adams— As quoted in Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn by Leon Wolff, p. 195
The world is full of warfare 'twixt the evil and the good;I watched the battle from afar as one who understoodThe shouting and confusion, the bloody, blundering fight—How few there are that see it clear, how few that wage it right!
henry van dyke— Another Chance.
Logistics is the ball and chain of armored warfare.
heinz guderian— Quoted in "Sword Point" - Page 141 - by Harold Coyle - 1988
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
orson welles— As the character Harry Lime in the film The Third Man (1949)
My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: "The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it."
bill mauldin— Mud & Guts : A Look at the Common Soldier of the American Revolution (1978) Foreword
Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest mayalso be the gentlest.
— 1962 Mankind Evolving.
Insurrectionby means of guerrilla bandsis the true method of warfare for all nations desirous of emancipating themselves from a foreign yoke.
Giuseppe Mazzini— 1833 General Instructions for the Members of Young Italy, section 4.
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I. Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
Peggy Noonan— What I Saw at the Revolution (1990)
All warfare is based on deception.
SunTzu— c.500-320 BC TheArt ofWar, ch.1,'Laying Plans', section18 (translated byJames Clavell,1981).
For the helmsman is recognized in the tempest; in the warfare the soldier is proved.
cyprian— Treatise VII - On the Mortality
I am concerned that many young people in the Hemisphere seem to envision the United States as a nation intoxicated by power, addicted to warfare, controlled by a military-industrial complex, and determined to preserve the status quo, that we are against rapid economic and social growth.
luis a. ferré— 1971 National Governors Association Annual Meeting NGA
Germ warfare against the United States would escalate to war against all humanity.
yoshijirō umezu— Quoted in "The Second Attack on Pearl Harbor" - Page 201 - by Steve Horn - History - 2005
A soldier has one item that cannot be neglected. His feet. They are his wheels, his mechanised warfare.
leon uris— As quoted in Quotes for the Air Force Logistician, pub. Air Force Logistics Management Agency (2001), p.115
Whatever happens in the country, whatever warfare harasses our land, we will never relinquish our hold on Western learning. As long as this school of ours stands, Japan remains a civilized nation of the world.
fukuzawa yukichi— Ch. X (The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi (1897))
I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.
Robertson Davies— "Sunday Morning"
For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.
benjamin disraeli— Letter to Lord Grey de Wilton (3 October 1873), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 5 (1920), p. 262.
No attempt of any kind must be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats, and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the most primitive demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews. Be hard, remember that the enemy has no regard for women and children when he bombs German cities.
karl dönitz— Orders issued on September 17, 1942, after an American Airplane bombed a U-boat carrying survivors. Quoted in "The Trial of the Germans" - Page 406 - by Eugene Davidson - History - 1997
I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.
karl dönitz— To Leon Goldensohn, July 14, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.
Margaret Mead— p.198 (People and Places, 1959)
The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won … Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.
bill moyers— Interview (28 October 2003)
It is not my purpose as a poet to condemn war (or to be exact, modern warfare). I only wish to present the universal aspects of a particular event,
herbert read— Note appended to Read's poem The End of War 1933
In Tunisia the Americans had to pay a stiff price for their experience, but it brought rich dividends. Even at that time, the American generals showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces, although we had to wait until the Patton Army in France to see the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare.
erwin rommel— Ch. 23 : The Sky Has Grown Dark, p. 523
All warfare is based on deception.
— Sun Tzu, Art of War.
Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
Frank gifford— American football player and television sports commentator
In a very clear and wonderful way, under the guise of physical warfare, the Gita describes the dual that perpetually goes on in the hearts of each one of us; a fight of dharma, justice, against adharma, evil, injustice. The battle takes place not only on the fields of Kurukshetra but also on the elusive dharmakshetra 'field of dharma', a spiritual field within each of us where all moral struggles are waged.
— Purushottama Lal, "The Bhagavadgita" (1965), Orient Paperbacks
Not arrested development or immaturity but deliberate and mature warfare against God marks the homosexual. God's penalty is death, and a godly order will enforce it.
— R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law, 1973, quoted in Steven E Atkins,
And O when the whirlwind of passion is raging, When sin in our hearts its wild warfare is waging, Then send down Thy grace, Thy redeemed to cherish; Rebuke the destroyer; "Save, Lord, or we perish."
— R. Heber, p. 550. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
It is now apparently part of the normal doctrine of those who advocate this system that no distinction can be made between combatants and non-combatants, and that a perfectly legitimate and indeed necessary method of warfare will be the wholesale destruction of unfortified cities and their inhabitants. No doubt there will be countervailing efforts to prevent such things happening; but there is, at any rate, one section of military thought which believes that the only way to stop the bombardment of the cities belonging to one belligerent will be the bombardment of the cities belonging to the other.
— Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, The Future of Civilization (1938)
