"Peace is not simply the absence of war; it is the presence of justice, equality, and opportunity."
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.
You don’t have to suffer war injuries to understand how tough life can be.
The first step toward winning the war on truth is to accept that we are in one.
War shortens the distance from person to person, from birth to death.
War, they say, is just business conducted through other means.
“It is no small thing, Major, to be lost in a blizzard in the night skies over war-torn Europe.”
War is the game played by old men with the lives of the young.
It remains one human episode amid all the atrocities which have stained the memory of the war.
War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.
Of ladies, knights, of passions and of wars,
of courtliness, and of valiant deeds I sing.
I think what'll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we'll have humane wars.