10,941 Quotes About War

Because of my father, I thought about the nature of historical calamities – revolutions, wars, and the like. Their primary horror is not in the shooting. And not even in famine. It is that the basest of human fervors are liberated. What is in a person that was previously suppressed by laws comes out in the open. Because for many people only external laws exist. And they have no internal laws. P. 43

I am alone in my study. I have already put away Julian's papers. The thing is finished. The world Julian wanted to preserve and restore is gone... but I shall not write "forever", for who can know the future? Meanwhile, the barbarians are at the gate. Yet when they breach the wall, they will find nothing of value to seize, only empty relics. The spirit of what we were has fled. So be it.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

Reggie Atkinson: Oh God. Oh God. I went to war with the Nazis... and for 25 years, all I've been scared of is Americans.

It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.

Max wanted to spit in Kellermann’s face and tell him he felt obligated to try to escape. It was his duty to buck the authority of those who commanded the camp. Wisely, he held his saliva and his tongue.

Bit by bit, the uprising that had brought out the best in Syrians and projected their aspirations and yearnings was vanishing as pain, vengefulness, and war took over. It was yet another page from the playbook of Hafez as well as all the despots who clung desperately to power at the start of the Arab Spring: civil war is acceptable and even desirable to defend the leader.

War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save the state from social petrification and stagnation