“War settles nothing.”
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.
“You can easily die racing to cover a bank robbery as you can in a war zone.”
“War settles nothing.”
“So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier.”
“Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.”
“Here we will solve with laws and dollars, problems that too many people around the world still must solve with violence and civil war.”
“As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.”
“Emancipation came to the colored race in America as a war measure. It was an act of military necessity. Manifestly it would have come without war, in the slower process of humanitarian reform and social enlightenment.”
“With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.”
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
“After every war someone has to tidy up.”
“Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.”
“In war there is no prize for runner-up.”
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
“War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.”
“War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.”
“A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.”