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.
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
A ruler that has but an army has one hand, but he who has a navy has both.
War is a terrible thing, and many people return with wounds invisible to the eye.
War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.
“Creatures trained in warfare are what he calls ‘philosophically anti-life.’”
A war is not won if the defeated enemy has not been turned into a friend.
A war is a disaster whether you win or you lose—it’s only a worse disaster if you lose.
Among man’s strange undertakings, war stood clearly forth as the strangest.