W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“War stinks! There's nothing good about it. But you know the whole thing, it's you or them.”
“War stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny .. .Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death.”
“War stripped of its passions. its phantasms. its finery. its veils. its violence. its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even. and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics. as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy. whereas the American
technological decoy only aims to deceive itself. The first days of the lightning attack. dominated by this technological mystification. will remain one of the finest bluffs. one of the finest collective mirages of contemporary History (along with Timisoara). We are all accomplices in these fantasmagoria. it must be said, as we are in any publicity campaign. In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications.”
Source: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
“War subjects itself to transportation in a way that we find acceptable.”
“War.
Such a little word, such a depth of agony. Blood, death, conquest, starvation, plague, and horror.”
Source: Legend
“War Survivors
In case some of you still don’t know
The most important thing about war survivors, which is:
Nobody survives a war!
That the winners are the biggest losers in wars,
Because to win a war, you must lose your humanity…
And when you lose the human inside you,
What remains?
Therefore, my friends,
The humanity of those who lose a war may be broken,
But that of the winners is totally lost…
And I confess to you, sometimes I don’t know which is more merciful:
To lose your humanity or to live broken in a shattered world?
[Original poem published in Arabic on November 29, 2022 at ahewar.org]”
“War, takes people's minds off thinking about poverty, famine, greed, heartache, egotistical societies, wealth and much more. Yes, war is the solution to all of man's problems and the answer for those who profit from it.”
“War takes people's lives and destroys property, but it does not resolve the world's problems. If anything is achieved through war, it is to plant the seeds for the next violent conflict as the vanquished and their children will usually not accept the outcome.”
“War takes so many more casualties than just the dead.”
Source: OtherWorlds: The Lost
“War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.”
Source: Mark Twain's Civil War
“War taught me that not everything is glamorous.”
“War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“War technology is science in the service of obscene anatomical vandalism.”
“War that hasn't affected us here, in the way that you would imagine a five-year war would affect a country.”
“War that I have anywhere in my life should stop.”
“War then, is a relation - not between man and man but between state and state and individuals are enemies only accidentally not as men, nor even as citizens but as soldiers not as members of their country, but as its defenders”
Source: On the Social Contract
“War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”
Source: On War: Vom Kriege: fog of war
“War, they say, is the answer of those who have no arguments left.”
Source: The Invisible Hands - Part 2: Castling
“War to me is the stupidest way of settling anything. The whole damn thing goes to pieces.”
“War to me is very much like sex. You can develop a theory that says sex is primarily for the exchange of genetic material, or that it's a celebration of life, or you can make up 50,000 theories about why human beings have sex, all of which are in some sense true, all of which by themselves miss the point. Because the answer is extraordinarily complex. It may be for fun, it may be for reproduction, for financial reasons, any number of things.”
“war to win peace is at best a dangerously illogical method.”
Source: The privilege of age: essays secular and spiritual
“War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.”
“War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept. There was a naivety and stupidity that war would be a great lark. It's not that different from Gone With The Wind, where all the young men can't wait to go off to fight and then two hours later in the movie, we see how the reality of that has come home to them.”
“War toys are scary. They have a rocket launcher with a bayonet attached, in case you miss.”
“War traumatizes soldier and civilian alike; warfare is a profit-making racket; warfare resolves nothing that negotiations can't resolve better; the weapons we have now make non-violence the only option to planetary annihilation.”
“War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected.”
“War used to have an evolutionary advantage – because every population has sadists.”
Source: Immortality Bytes: Digital Minds Don't Get Hungry
“War veterans of a lost war and those who have loved and lost have something in common: both are heart-broken. But the physical wounds of the former are visible, the emotional scars of the latter and the inner pain they carry within is not always apparent”
“War vies with magic in its efforts to get something for nothing.”
Source: Technics and Civilization
“War. War never changes.”
“War! war! no peace! Peace is to me a war.
O Lymoges! O Austria! thou dost shame
That bloody spoil. Thou slave, thou wretch, thou coward!
Thou little valiant, great in villainy!
Thou ever strong upon the stronger side!
Thou Fortune's champion that dost never fight
But when her humorous ladyship is by
To teach thee safety! Thou art perjur'd too,
And sooth'st up greatness. What a fool art thou,
A ramping fool, to brag and stamp and swear
Upon my party! Thou cold-blooded slave,
Hast thou not spoke like thunder on my side,
Been sworn my soldier, bidding me depend
Upon thy stars, thy fortune, and thy strength,
And dost thou now fall over to my foes?
Thou wear a lion's hide! Doff it for shame,
And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
AUSTRIA. O that a man should speak those words to me!
BASTARD. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
AUSTRIA. Thou dar'st not say so, villain, for thy life.
BASTARD. And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.
KING JOHN. We like not this: thou dost forget thyself.”
Source: King John
“War was ... the chief or maybe the only source of patriotism, and many a politician, from prehistory up to this morning, unified a discontented citizenry by pointing out a national danger and declaring war on it.”
Source: Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories
“War was a hellish, horrible hideous thing - too horrible and hideous to happen in the twentieth century between civilised nations.”
Source: Rilla of Ingleside
“War was a terrible, fickle thing–an eternal, horrendous nightmare for those who lived it, and a thing easily forgotten by those who didn’t.”
Source: A Long Lost Fantasy
“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
Source: Blood Meridian: Picador Classic
“War was an awful thing. It left an impression on her cells, soured the blood flowing through her veins, leaving a rotten stench inside her that only she could smell. She didn’t want to admit it was guilt, but it was, festering forever in her core.”
Source: Ignite the Stars
“War was an illness in a way, treatable only by the passing of time, and many were stricken until the end of their days.”
Source: The Offing
“War was forced upon mankind in his original civil and social condition.”
Source: Addresses on International Subjects
“War was fought by individuals, not by Emperors and politicians. Battles were decided by people whose names might never be recorded in history. But the point wasn't history, or even who won. Anyone who strove hard enough could become a hero. That was the point.”
Source: Fatal Alliance
“War was funny like that: one minute you could try and block it and have the most wonderful thoughts, the next you were back in the nightmare.”
Source: The Edelweiss Express
“War was hell and magic wasn't real. I didn't need to be some famous man to say that.
— Alice”
Source: Alice in the Land of Clovers
“War was hell.
So was Andersonville Prison.
Justice lay curled on her side on the dank, roach-infested floor. She inhaled a short breath, trying to keep from breathing too deeply when waste of all sorts and colours lined every square inch of the place. How had it come to this?”
Source: Deadeye
“War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.”
“War was never so careful as to inflict suffering only where it was merited.”
Source: Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker
“War was nothing but brown sand and red blood. A putrid mixture that crept and oozed into every crevice of our bodies, our minds . . . our souls.”
Source: Splintered Silence
“War was part chance, part common sense, part the pluck and luck of the devil.”
Source: The Judgment House: The Works of Gilbert Parker
“War was so many things, and not the least of which confusion. What was wrong? What was right, for that matter?
Was killing right or wrong? Brave or cowardly? Human nature or unnatural behavior of creatures too smart for their own good?
Loyalty, betrayal, hate, love, fear, friendship, teamwork, violence. War was connected to all of these. Hard work, sadness, suffering, discipline, chaos, questions, few answers, strategy, bravery, foolishness, death, life.
And both winning and losing were only two small aspects of the word war.”
Source: Dragon Claws
“War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.”
“War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.”
“War was what the world would say Achilles was born for. That his hands and swift feet were fashioned for this alone - the cracking of Troy's mighty walls. They would throw him among thousands of Trojan spears and watch with triumph as he stained his fair hands red.”