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War Quotes

Two of the best-known lines about war are flagged as misattributed, and both stories are worth knowing.

“In war, truth is the first casualty” is credited to Aeschylus, and sometimes to the US senator Hiram Johnson. It is not in his speeches. The first recorded use Wikiquote found is by Philip Snowden in July 1916, introducing a book by E. D. Morel, and he wrote “it has been said”, so it was probably already going around. Samuel Johnson made the same point in The Idler in 1758, about “the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages”.

“Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing, sooner than of war” is credited to Homer, and it is a misquotation of the Iliad (Book 13). In the original, most men prefer those things to war. It is the Trojans who can never get enough of fighting.

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Most quoted on war:

Wars are a summer pastime, Althalus. Politics is a year-round entertainment.

David Eddings The Redemption of Althalus (2000)

I don’t see ANY beneficiary of this crazy war! Innocent people and soldiers are dying.

Oleg Tinkov

“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”

Aminatta Forna

In the second Punic war with winged flight
The Muse to Romulus’ warrior nation came.

Porcius Licinus

Karen tried to divine from the news whether they were winning the war or losing it. He might just as well have swirled tea leaves and looked for patterns there.

James S. A. Corey Livesuit (2024)

Beautiful Somali buildings are rising up in a former war zone. It gives me hope.

Sada Mire

By the end of the war in 1991, the lives of Eritrean women had changed so much they were determined not to go back to their traditional old roles.

Helen Meles

I was worried what other people would say. It was a tug of war of emotions. Eventually, I had no choice, I had to dive in

Fanele Ntuli

I am an African, and these are two African countries which have shed a lot of blood in the war that ended in 2000.

Joseph Legwaila

If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.

Milton Friedman America's Drug Forum interview (1991)

In the war of the maggot beggars’ world

Sayo Kitamura The Prophet of Tabuse (1954)

[T]hey who complain, in peace, of the insolence of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.

Samuel Johnson The Bravery of the English Common Soldiers (1760)

No device of man can remove the tragedy from war, yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

George W. Bush Mission Accomplished (2003)

None of these countries had revolutions with bloody casualties and there was no civil war in any of the republics... Russia had to change and it did change.

Boris Yeltsin

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

Edward Gibbon The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire (1776)

Chicano chauvinists and Mexican agents have made clear their intent to take back through demography and culture what their ancestors lost through war.

Pat Buchanan State of Emergency (2006)

The press, which dropped an Iron Curtain weeks ago on the anti-war speeches of Morse and Gruening, ignored this one, too.

I. F. Stone NPR: Excerpt: The Best of I.F. Stone (2006)

The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war — for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that.

Susan Sontag Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)

It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.

Primo Levi The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

England is, I believe, the only country in which during a great war eminent men write and speak publicly as if they belonged to the enemy.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

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