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:

Many of the qualities your son develops to kill in war—or be a hero at work—undermine the qualities it takes to love at home.

Warren Farrell The Boy Crisis (2018)

Even if a soldier lives, the risks of war come home with the warrior—that for every soldier killed, about twenty-five veterans kill themselves.

Warren Farrell The Boy Crisis (2018)

Your trouble is, the Old Faith reinforces every wish to kill that war has roused in you.

Poul Anderson The People of the Wind (1973)

When your life has been spent in one war after another for forty-five years, you have to be pretty handy to survive.

David Gemmell

The historical record suggests that the transition to to a new hegemon has always been attended by what I have elsewhere called hegemonic war.

Robert Gilpin The Political Economy of International Relations (1987)