“War is the trade of Kings.”
War is the failure of every other option. These quotes do not glorify conflict — they examine its causes, costs, and consequences through the eyes of soldiers, leaders, pacifists, and survivors who understand what is really at stake.
“My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.”
“War is the trade of Kings.”
“Republicans have been losing the war of words for years now. Now they are just caving because they don't even want to try. I don't agree with that approach.”
“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
“When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.”
“I found that I was getting a warm reception for my message of freeing you from the income tax, releasing you from Social Security, ending the insane war on drugs, restoring gun rights, and reducing the federal government to just its constitutional functions.”
“But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.”
“It is our duty still to endeavor to avoid war but if it shall actually take place, no matter by whom brought on, we must defend ourselves. If our house be on fire, without inquiring whether it was fired from within or without, we must try to extinguish it.”
“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”
“I think I'm just someone that just tries to get by. I'm kind of - if it was during the Second World War, I'd be a black marketeer, I think.”
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.”
“Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.”
“Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.”
“So instead of talking about theoretical ways of ending the war and violence, I say that we have to get rid of the individual asholes in each office and situation.”
“Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that's their gift.”
“We are not at war against Islam.”