But silenced now are laws in war: we driven from our homes; yet is our exile willing.
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.
War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world.
As always, war had lowered the level of American tolerance for any kind of dissent.
That man Grant will fight us everyday and every hour until the end of the war.
A war is never undertaken by the ideal State, except in defense of its honor or its safety.