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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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Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Samuel Johnson The Idler (1758)

The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

George S. Patton

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

George S. Patton

In the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand.

Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469) (1485)

For the love of God, for the love of your children and of the civilization to which you belong, cease this madness.

George F. Kennan The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Vol. 37 (1981)

Although too much of a soldier among sovereigns, no one could claim with better right to be a sovereign among soldiers.

Walter Scott Life of Napoleon (1827)

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Richelieu (1839)

It is easy to kill someone with a slash of a sword. It is hard to be impossible for others to cut down.

Yagyū Munenori Behold the Second Horseman (2005)

It is presumptively wrong to do violence to innocent persons.

Robert L. Holmes On War and Morality (1989)

We will never know whether there is a realistic moral alternative to violence unless we are willing to explore the potential of nonviolent action.

Robert L. Holmes On War and Morality (1989)

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.

Thomas Paine

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

Winston Churchill

A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.

Adlai Stevenson II Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

The god of war has gone over to the other side.

Adolf Hitler

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

James Madison

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

James Madison

"Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

Carl Sandburg

Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would gladly yield every honor which has been accorded me in war.

Douglas MacArthur Macarthur and the American Century: A Reader (2001)

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

William S. Burroughs

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