The Services in war time are fit only for desperadoes but, in peace, are fit only for fools.
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.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
War is a man’s game—the killing machine has a gender, and it is male.
"Why must there be war?" "Oh Lavinia, what a woman's question that is! Because men are men."
It is the great challenge of our time: How to achieve justice, with struggle, but without war.
In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.
When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with.
Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.
We are watching the Germans closely; we are not forgetting what they did to us during the war.
Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.
Out of that bungled, unwise war
An alp of unforgiveness grew.