10,941 Quotes About War

Wars end when nations agree that war is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute; wars begin when nations agree that peaceful diplomacy is an unsatisfactory instrument for solving their dispute. Agreement is the essence of the transition from peace to war and from war to peace, for those are merely alternating phases of a relationship between nations.

The ancient and the modern blended together in haunting harmony. The war looked like a dream here; a fantasy dwarfed by the sands of time.

Manchester’s disciples believed that paradise was an international bazaar. They favoured the international flow of goods and ideas and the creation of institutions that channeled that flow and the abolition of institutions that blocked it. Nations, they argued, now grow richer though commerce than though conquest.

In the palace of glass and iron, the locomotive and telegraphic equipment were admired not only as mechanical wonders; they were also messengers of peace and instruments of unity.

If I die anytime soon, you make sure they bury me right.

This history of mine, Herodotus says, has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love....

The essence of my happiness is fighting for the happiness of others. It’s strange, why is it that in grammar, the word "happiness” can only be singular? That is counter to its meaning, after all. … If it turns necessary to die for the common happiness, then I’m braced to.

Perhaps it is the knowledge that we carry in our hearts that nobody ultimately wins. Somewhere we all go down. Force used tyrannically is our common enemy. Why align ourselves with it in whatever shape or fashion.

Once it comprises the report of war, the composition of history has the well-known tendency to reflect the interpretations of the winner.