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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:

For centuries, women have been raped in every war. It's even a pleasant activity, sometimes I would rape if I caught up. But my leg, my knee hurts.

Tadeusz Różewicz

My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War.

Tusiata Avia

I exhibit games with problematic portrayals of cultures, identities, or war. This is intentional; I want us to confront these realities

Jazmin Morris

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

G. K. Chesterton The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)

War was a get-together of the vain.

Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin (2009)

Go back, go back, you silly bastards. This ain't our kind of war. This one is for the birds.

Bill Downs

I based the choreography I did for WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS on the techniques of professional wrestlers. I think it turned out very well.

Haruo Nakajima Haruo Nakajima Interview" , Kaiju Conversations (1995)

If we imagine characters, can we cause them to appear in the real world? What if I could strongly write peace, I can cause an end to war.

Maxine Hong Kingston

"I always wanted to paint. Always, before the war, that is. But I was thirteen then." ("Splinter")

Ida Fink A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1985)

of an event is unlikely to be interesting after it and this may be the reason why my prophetic utterances regarding the Great War took the form of Satire.

Gilbert Cannan

We are saying — as war veterans — enough is enough. You have shown that you have failed. It can’t get any worse

Blessed Runesu Geza

I feel that on account of ... countless war widows and orphans ... I should waive collection of a pension.

Aurora Quezon

the need to reduce the fears, tensions and presssures of war.

Lloyd (Bud) Winter Relax and Win (1981)

FoxNews hates the #SyriaWithdrawal. So does #MSNBC and #CNN. So both parties, cable networks and weapons makers all agree. No wonder our wars never end.

Medea Benjamin

Index entry, The Second World War, Volume I: The Gathering Storm (1948)

Winston Churchill The Second World War (book series) (1948)

War as I knew it (1947), as cited in Oxford Essential Quotations (4th ed.), By Susan Ratcliffe.

George S. Patton

I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried (1990)

I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Tim O'Brien The Things They Carried (1990)

I'm sickened by the way that the delivery of so-called humanitarian aid is once again being used as a justification — or cover — for war.

Susan Sontag Salon interview (2001)

The guy's a war hero. He's not a coward like George Bush. He didn't duck into a Champagne unit in the Texas Air National Guard and disappear like George Bush.

Mike Malloy

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