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.
In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power.
"Leave him alone. He has already met his judge. I wage war on the living, not the dead."
This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war.
Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.
He had thought his wars over. Now he realized peace had been merely a lull.