Skip to content

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.

Random quote on War

Most quoted on war:

Still may syllabes jar with time,
Still may reason war with rhyme,
Resting never!

Ben Jonson The Works of Ben Jonson, Second Folio (1640)

I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Kofi Annan's kangaroo court...a clear and present danger to the war on terrorism and Americans fighting it all over the world.

Tom DeLay

Saddam is a war criminal and there are no two people who can argue over this.

Muqtada Sadr

We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.

Thomas Friedman

I heard somebody say that the war ended today, but everybody knows it's going still.

Devendra Banhart

I should like to have been killed in the war.

Enoch Powell

A nation that silences or intimidates original minds is left only with unoriginal minds and cannot hope to hold its own in the competition of peace or of war.

Henry Steele Commager Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent (1954)

I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting.

Curtis LeMay

We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.

Ron Paul

In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.

Andrew Bacevich The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005)

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

John McPhee The Control of Nature (1989)

I felt the ruthfulness and senselessness of war so acutlely that I wrote the first three stanzas of which, are in effect a prayer.

Richard Eberhart

The people who are slamming me have no idea about what it feels like to unjustly have a child killed in an insane war.

Cindy Sheehan

For he was a merciful man, who loved not slaughter, although his fierce faith drove him from war to war.

H. Rider Haggard The Brethren (1904)

We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war.

Edward Heath

We can't ignore the fact that ahead of us is a great war and this war is going to need significant preparation.

Ahad Ha'am

All these blunders were, in war as in peace, the outcome of the deceptive selection and presentation of news.

Emil Ludwig Wilhelm Hohenzollern: The Last of the Kaisers (1926)

If we are minded to affirm Christ's Kingdom as we ought, we must wage irreconcilable war with him who is plotting its ruin.

John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536)

Related topics