Quotes about war

A new kind of award has been added -- the deathbed award. It is not an award of any kind. Either the recipient has not acted at all, or was not nominated, or did not win the award the last few times around. It is intended to relieve the guilty conscience of the Academy members and save face in front of the public. The Academy has the horrible taste to have a star, choking with emotion, present this deathbed award so that there can be no doubt in anybody's mind why the award is so hurriedly given. Lucky is the actor who is too sick to watch the proceedings on television.

— Marlene Dietrich

Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.

— Gerald Early

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

— Robert Graves

Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

— Joseph Heller

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war --for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

— John Lennon

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

— David Mamet

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

— Peter Ustinov

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

— Walter Benjamin

To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize.

— Andre Breton

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

— Henry Miller

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

— Richard Rorty

Most people grow old within a small circle of ideas, which they have not discovered for themselves. There are perhaps less wrong-minded people than thoughtless.

— Marquis De Vauvenargues

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

— Virginia Woolf

If the frontline people do count, you couldn't prove it by examining the reward systems in most organizations.

— Karl Albrecht

A wage hike is very hard to take away, but bonuses and profit-sharing can disappear very quickly in hard times...More people are realizing that bonuses look like raises, but really aren't.

— Al Bauman

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

— Buddha

He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.

— Confucius

Blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds, and though a late, a sure reward succeeds.

— William Congreve

Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.

— E. V. Cooke

Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.

— Quentin Crisp

The idea of thanking staff should mean giving them something that they would never buy for themselves.

— Jayne Crook

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow -- perhaps it all will.

— Albert Einstein

It is one of the most beautiful compensations in life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The effects of our actions may be postponed but they are never lost. There is an inevitable reward for good deeds and an inescapable punishment for bad. Meditate upon this truth, and seek always to earn good wages from Destiny.

— Fu Wu Ming

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood

— Phillip C. Grant

Let the motive be in the deed and not in the event. Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward.

— Kreeshna

Always reward your long hours of labor and toil in the very best way, surrounded by your family. Nurture their love carefully, remembering that your children need models, not critics, and your own progress will hasten when you constantly strive to present your best side to your children. And even if you have failed at all else in the eyes of the world, if you have a loving family, you are a success.

— Og Mandino

People think that if a man has undergone any hardship, he should have a reward; but for my part, if I have done the hardest possible day's work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably --why, then I don't think I deserve any reward for my hard day's work --for am I not now at peace? Is not my supper good?

— Herman Melville

What are we hoping to get out of it, what's it all in aid of -- is it really just for the sake of a gloved hand waving at you from a golden coach?

— John Osborne

He that does good for good's sake seeks neither paradise nor reward, but he is sure of both in the end.

— William Penn

The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.

— Jules Renard

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.

— John D. Rockefeller

God's delays are not God's denials.

— Robert H. Schuller

Greater even than the pious man is he who eats that which is the fruit of his own toil; for scripture declares him twice-blessed.

— The Talmud

Not in rewards, but in the strength to strive, the blessing lies.

— J. T. Towbridge

Companies that give excellent service reward employees for providing it.

— Source Unknown

No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.

— Booker T. Washington

With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see.

— Ella Wheeler Wilcox

O can't you see, brother -- Death's a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.

— C. D. Andrews

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.

— Hannah Arendt

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

— Margot Asquith

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

— Walter Bagehot

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

— Charles Baudelaire

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

— Baudouin I

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.

— Ruth Benedict

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

— Tony Benn

The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.

— Friedrich Von Bernhardi

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.

— Hans A. Bethe

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

— Otto Von Bismarck

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!

— Alexander Blok

War is like love, it always finds a way.

— Bertolt Brecht

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.

— Winston Churchill

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.

— Marcus T. Cicero

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.

— Karl Von Clausewitz

A just war is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

— Alexander Cockburn

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.

— Noel Coward

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.

— Rebecca Harding Davis

War is the trade of Kings.

— John Dryden

War, he sung, is toil and trouble; Honor but an empty bubble.

— John Dryden

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

The pioneers of a warless world are the young men and women who refuse military service.

— Albert Einstein

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

— Albert Einstein

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

— T. S. Eliot

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

— Desiderius Erasmus

Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselves to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves -- there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it? -- are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help -- can you face him honestly?).

— James Fenton

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.

— Anne Frank

What vast additions to the conveniences and comforts of living might mankind have acquired, if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public utility; what an extension of agriculture even to the tops of our mountains; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals; what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices, and improvements might not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief.

— Benjamin Franklin

Morality is contraband in war.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

— Martha Gellhorn

I feel sure that coups d'?tat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what was happening and not miss anything.

— Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect. We have awakened from an opium-dream of comfort, of ease, of that miserable poltroonery of the sheltered life. Our wish for indulgence of every sort, our laxity of manners, our wretched sensitiveness to personal inconvenience, these are suddenly lifted before us in their true guise as the specters of national decay; and we have risen from the lethargy of our dilettantism to lay them, before it is too late, by the flashing of the unsheathed sword.

— Sir Edmund Gosse

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

— William Hazlitt

Frankly, I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.

— Joseph Heller

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

— Ernest Hemingway

Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.

— Thomas Hobbes

War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself.

— E. J. Hobsbawm

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed, there would be no more wars.

— Abbie Hoffman

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

— Herbert Clark Hoover

War seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene.

— Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

— Aldous Huxley

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.

— Washington Irving

What we believe is more important than our material existence, therefore warfare is a legitimate extension of values.

— Edward Johnson

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

— John F. Kennedy

Oh, the brave Music of a distant drum!

— Omar Khayyam

War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.

— Rudyard Kipling

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

— Arthur Koestler

Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?

— KaThe Kollwitz

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

— Karl Kraus

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

— Karl Kraus

The more prosperous and settled a nation, the more readily it tends to think of war as a regrettable accident; to nations less fortunate the chance of war presents itself as a possible bountiful friend.

— Lewis H. Lapham

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters -- not to talk in armies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home.

— D. H. Lawrence

Of course in war all madnesses come out in a man, that is the fault of war not of a man or a nation.

— Frieda Lawrence

I see that old flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.

— Douglas Macarthur

In war there is no substitute for victory.

— Douglas Macarthur

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

— Douglas Macarthur