A man of keen intelligence, vigorous in war, and unusually generous.
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 coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.
The war of the poor against the rich is the only way from oppression to deliverance.
In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.
Do we progress, in an upwards fashion, or merely ride the cycles of war and peace, boom and bust?
The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.
People don't realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?