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.
Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise the King born of all England.
War, no matter what our intentions may be, brings suffering and tragedy.
There 's but the twinkling of a star
Between a man of peace and war.
There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.
I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
There may be a hundred stances and sword positions, but you win with just one.
A serjeant is a soldier with a halbert, and a drummer is a soldier with a drum.
To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war.
The atomic bomb had dwarfed the international issues to complete insignificance.
A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer.
They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.