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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.

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Most quoted on war:

When we have such compassion we will not despoil the earth as we are doing now, and we will have no wars.

Jiddu Krishnamurti Talks in Saanen (1974)

Truth has anciently been called the first casualty of war. Money may, in fact, have priority.

John Kenneth Galbraith Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)

Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past.

Joe Haldeman Forever Peace (1997)

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

Abbie Hoffman Revolution for the Hell of It (1968)

Most people will not question the rationalizations offered by their government for starting or continuing a war.

Susan Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

We get up and go to work, we get up and go to church, and we get up and go to war when necessary.

Jeff Foxworthy

A man can be called assertive if he launches World War Three. A woman can be called assertive if she puts you on hold.

Gloria Steinem

War unleashes – at the same time as the reactionary forces of the capitalist world – the generating forces of social revolution which ferment in its depths.

Rosa Luxemburg

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.

Robert Aumann War and peace (2005)

I have yet to encounter any officer here who has read an account of the Russo-Japanese War.

Chesty Puller

To move swiftly, strike vigorously, and secure all the fruits of victory is the secret of successful war.

Stonewall Jackson Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War (1904)

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

James Baldwin Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

Harry Turtledove Southern Victory (1997)

That there should be wars between nations who learned their first lessons in citizenship from the same mother seems to me fratricidal insanity.

Stanley Baldwin

Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous.

William Carlos Williams The Wedge (1944)

Thenceforth, the effort to abolish war seemed to me, and still seems to me, the only political object worth while.

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood A Great Experiment (1941)

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.

Henry Kissinger

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

Kenneth Clark Civilisation (1969)

But Caesar had more than a mere name and military reputation: his energy could never rest, and his one disgrace was to conquer without war.

Lucan

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