W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“War only in the ring. Peace on earth”
“War or Peace?
My ego can't live in peace, but it can thrive in war.”
“war. Or, rather, wars. Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust, wars with shifting casts of supposed heroes and villains, each new hero making one increasingly nostalgic for the old villain. The names changed, as did the faces, and I spit on them equally for all the petty feuds, the snipers, the land mines, bombing raids, the rockets, the looting and raping and killing.”
Source: And the Mountains Echoed
“War ought to be no man's wish.”
Source: Collected Writings
“War over water would be an ultimate obscenity. And yet, unfortunately it is conceivable... Water has been a source over so many years of erosion of confidence, of tension, of human rights abuses, really, of so many in areas whose traditional water supplies have been controlled and depleted by occupational authorities. That must stop if we're going to be able to develop a climate for peace.”
“War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.”
Source: Now and After: the ABC of Anarchist Communism
“War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood. It degrades and stupefies with the sense that you are not responsible, that 'tis not yours to think and reason why, but to do and die,' like the hundred thousand others doomed like yourself. War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.”
Source: Now and After: the ABC of Anarchist Communism
“War poisons the land Like diseased minds downloaded/ into bowls of tears.”
Source: The River of Winged Dreams (Hardcover Gift Edition)
“War prevails because we the customer keep buying it - sometimes in the name of faith, sometimes culture and other times nationality. Enough I say! Enough!”
Source: Mücadele Muhabbet: Gospel of An Unarmed Soldier
“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.”
“War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings...but no one has for those reasons yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.”
“War proves nothing. To kill a man does not prove that he was in the wrong. Bloodletting cannot change men's spirits, neither can the evil of men's thoughts be driven out by blows. If I go to my neighbor's house, and break her furniture, and smash her pictures, and bind her children captive, it does not prove that I am fitter to live than she - yet according to ethics of nations it does. I have conquered her and she must pay me for my trouble; and her house and all that is left in it belongs to my heirs and successors, forever. That is war!”
Source: In Times Like These
“War provides an outlet for every evil element in man's nature. It enfranchises cupidity and greed gives a charter to petty tyranny, glorifies cruelty and places in positions of power the vulgar and base.”
“War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side’s propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars. Saber-rattlers proclaim that the opposition’s militant disciples instituted this ordeal of conquest and destruction.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.”
Source: ANTI-MEMOIRS
“War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.”
Source: The Ascent of Man
“War remains the decisive human failure.”
Source: The Economics of Innocent Fraud
“War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.”
“War’s all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.”
Source: Hagridden
“War's always the same! Children starve, women suffer, men lose their fortunes or turn into beasts!”
Source: Oliver Wiswell
“War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on.”
Source: Dandelion Wine
“War scenes are less difficult than love scenes.”
“War seems a perfectly impossible thing, even when it can be seen coming nearer and nearer.”
Source: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women
“War seems like a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle.
For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe.
They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now, They take the wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.
If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron half helm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the small folk whose land they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad in all steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world.
And the man breaks.”
Source: A Feast for Crows
“War seems like romance until you lose your loved one in it.”
Source: "Zaki's Gift Of Love"
“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.”
“War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.”
“War seems to me to be a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press”
Source: The World As I See It
“War seldom enters but where wealth allures.”
Source: The Poetical Works of John Dryden
“War shapes itself around them, gunfire that sounds like pneumatic drilling, shelling that drums the earth and sends shudders into the house, the windows and the wooden floors rattling...”
Source: Prophet Song
“War should always be the absolute last resort.”
“War should be carried on like a monsoon; one changeless determination of every particle towards the one unalterable aim.”
Source: Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile and Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter
“War should be made a crime, and those who instigate it should be punished as criminals.”
“War should be the only study of a prince. He should consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes as ability to execute, military plans.”
“War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.”
Source: My American Journey
“War should be undertaken in such a way as to show that its only object is peace.”
“War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.”
Source: Pope John Paul II, Pilgrim of Peace
“War should neither be feared nor provoked.”
“War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.”
Source: A Supplement to A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents
“War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.”
Source: On War
“War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.”
Source: Selected Writings of James Madison
“War should only be used for a policy worth its sacrifices.”
“War should we waged without love of violence, cruelty, or enmity.”
“War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.”
Source: The Lacuna
“War some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from.”
“War sounds romantic, heroic even, until everyone you know starts dying.”
Source: Under Different Stars
“War spares not the brave, but the cowardly.”
“War spells out my philosophy of “No right or wrong”— just “Your right, my wrong”—everything is subjective.”
Source: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
“War starts in the mind, not in the body.”
“War starts where humanity ends.”