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.
The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.
Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.
All men are warriors. And life for everything in our universe is nothing but war.
It is His Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war.
It is the thing protected, not the instrument of protection, that involves you in war.
But a war of any scope will give rise to others as formidable.
It is madness for any country to build its policy with an eye to nuclear war.
All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is a war.
I told them that in Qur'an and in Arabic language jihad does not mean war.
You do not need chariots and horsemen, harps and war-horns, to make history interesting.