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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:

Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.

Francis Bacon

Such subtle Covenants shall be made,
Till Peace it self is War in Masquerade.

John Dryden

War is necessary. War brings pain, but war is necessary. War brings peace, because war is necessary. Get your warriors up.

Nas War is Necessary (2008)

They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Isaiah

Now the real fruits of human nature – the arts, sciences, great enterprises, lofty conceptions, manly virtues – are due especially to the state of war. […] In a word, we can say that blood is the manure of the plant we call genius.

Joseph de Maistre Considerations on France (1796)

The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie...

Leon Trotsky

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

Chris Hedges

O great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o'er-rank states, thou grand decider
Of dusty and old titles, that healest with blood
The earth when it is sick, and curest the world
O' the pleurisy of people.

John Fletcher

War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

In the 21st century, there is a tendency to blur the distinction between the state of war and peace. Wars are no longer declared, and once they have begun, they do not proceed according to the pattern we are accustomed to.

Valery Gerasimov

That is the way of the wickedness called war. It eats us all. In the end, it and it alone is the victor, no matter what the lie called history says. The god of War, Mars the Magnificent and Tragic, always wins.

Stephen Hunter Basil's War (2021)

Hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at Arques, and you were not there.

Henry IV of France

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

Plato

From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming.
Glamdring glittered white in answer.

J. R. R. Tolkien

"What other fairer way would you desire?" said Aragorn.
"A plain road, though it led through a hedge of swords," said Boromir.

J. R. R. Tolkien

A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath; if he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected.

Hippolytus of Rome

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

Hannah Arendt On Violence (1970)

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Thomas Hood

It was sad. It's war. Many others died, too. It's war.

Wilhelm Frick

The great war of to-day is a war for bread and butter

Belva Ann Lockwood Growth of Peace Principles (1895)

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