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.

Random quote on War

Most quoted on war:

Let Will but set its appetite on war,
And Reason will promptly invent offence,
And furnish blood with arguments.

Alfred Austin Prince Lucifer (1887)

That was the true terror of war, that often one had to accept danger and simply wait to live or die.

David Zindell War in Heaven (1998)

It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us.

James Jones

The nature of encounter operations required of the commanders limitless initiative and constant readiness to take the responsibility for military actions.

Georgy Zhukov

I grinned. “The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.”

Glen Cook The Black Company (1984)