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 is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
I know a little of navigation:
War, trade, and piracy, allow,
As three in one, no separation.
Let us emphasize that there is not a soldier to be compared to Camilo in this war of liberation.
The war [World War 1.] is founded on a glaring mistake, men have been confused with machines.
Their peace and their war
Are like wind and storm.War grows from their peace.
War is very simple, but in War the simplest things become very difficult.
There is no war so important that to win it, we must destroy our minds.
All my life I have been a pacifist. All my life I have hated war and loved peace.
The United States has never entered a serious war, and has never been victorious.
Let the gull'd fool the toil of war pursue,
Where bleed the many to enrich the few.