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.
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
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, blood shed they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Harry Lime— Harry Lime's speech to Holly Martins as he leaves the great wheel, The Third Man. This phrase was added to the script by Welles who played Harry Lime. 1949
[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
We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
wernher von braun— Arts & Entertainment, Biography (1959–1961 series). Mike Wallace, television biography of Wernher von Braun, video clip of the press statement. (May 1945)
There is no such thing as an "atrocity" in warfare that is greater than the atrocity of warfare itself.
sydney j. harris— All's Fair in War
— Strictly Personal syndicated column (31 August 1981)
It's emotional warfare telling the people we love, the most, the truth about ourselves.
lauryn hill— MTV Unplugged 2.0, By: Lauryn Hill (2002)
The US has always taken velvet revolution into consideration by promoting Western culture in the society and by causing strife between people and the government through propaganda, organizing certain individuals, psychological warfare and making intentional use of media, intellectual circles, university student's establishments and feminism movements in order to implement its interfering policies.
ahmad khatami— Cleric says US seeks velvet revolution, Press TV, 20 Jul 2007
Shall we now give up the independence we have won, and crusade abroad in a utopian attempt to force our ideas on the rest of the world; or shall we use air power, and the other advances of modern warfare, to guard and strengthen the independence of our nation?
charles lindbergh— A speech on “Air Power” (29 August 1941)
Erich Ludendorff was considered the brains of the new German command. He pushed for the resumption of unlimited submarine warfare, which ultimately brought America into the conflict.
erich ludendorff— Winston Groom
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
hannah arendt— "On Violence"
That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
iain banks— Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32)
Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.
Gregory Bateson— p.25 (Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988)
Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority. Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word “anarchy” was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.
errico malatesta— Anarchy (1891)
I don't think we are ever prepared for the level of warfare at which ignorance fights.
steve maraboli— p. 73 (Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010))
Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.
james mattis— In response to a question during a congressional hearing about whether the U.S. should modify its Afghan strategy in response to six U.S. soldiers being killed by Afghan soldiers between Feb. 23 and March 1. As quoted in Key commanders have their say on Afghanistan (2012) by Walter Pincus, The Washington Post
I was surprised to see that there was indeed religiously sanctioned violence in it , as well as some others things which I found disturbing. But it was all intriguing, because I was entranced by the shorter, poetic chapters. I thought it very striking that this beauty could co-exist with clear mandates for warfare and violence against unbelievers .
robert spencer— "Jihad will destroy us if we don't act now." at "catholicherald.co.uk, features opinion, 2007
The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enourmously destructive and entirely indecisive.
— The War in the Air (1907), Ch. VIII, §1
No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.
— “A Book Which Reveals Men to Themselves”, Address on the Tercentenary of the Tranlation of the Bible (7 May 1911) in The Politics of Woodrow Wilson, p. 104.
I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
howard zinn— Ch. 1 (A People's History of the United States (1980))
He is one of the noblest conquerors who carries on a successful warfare against his own appetites and passions, and has them under wise and full control.
— A Dictionary of Thoughts, p. 512.
Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state's warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.
— "Praying to the Military Moloch," Economic Policy Journal, June 6, 2014
Logistics is the ball and chain of armored warfare.
— Heinz Guderian, Quoted in "Sword Point" - Page 141 - by Harold Coyle - 1988
There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
— Warren Buffet, in New York Times Magazine (November 2006)
The outstanding achievement of this war in the field of joint undertakings was the perfection of amphibious operations, the most difficult of all operations in modern warfare.
— Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, in The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, General of the Army H. H. Arnold, Commanding General, Army Air Forces, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander-in-Chief, US Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations (1947).
