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.
Every Christian has the power to support or to oppose preparedness to wage atomic war.
Civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when.
The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.
My national defense policy is to prepare for war, but not to provoke.
Normally, cultures don't fight. That is why they are cultures: because they do not wage wars.
What should we do to avoid the nuclear war, or is it already a given? It certainly seems that way.
Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.