“Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”
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.
“In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.”
“Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.”
“The real war will never get in the books.”
“This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.”
“What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.”
“There was never a war on poverty. Maybe there was a skirmish on poverty.”
“I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.”
“With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you should get all the way into trouble with no exit strategy, and have the cameras rolling.”
“We're not going to baby sit a civil war.”
“The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.”
“I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.”
“When you get billions in aid and your weapons resupplied and your ammunition stock resupplied, you don't learn the lesson that war is bad and nobody wins.”
“A state of war is not a blank check... when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.”
“We have a war dictator who was not elected, he snuck in. so he punishes people that threaten him in any way, or even say something he doesn't like. It has no resemblance to democracy.”
“This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”
“In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.”