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.
His immediate impression had been that here was a ward heeler in a Charvet tie.
You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.
No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.
If the President had his way, we’d have a nuclear war every week.
Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?
When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war.
You wait for the war to happen like vultures. If you want to help, prevent the war.
You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again!
There's no discharge in the war!
Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon.
NATO should have disbanded after the Cold War, just as the Warsaw Pact did.