10,941 Quotes About War

Someone had to show them there was more to life than constant war, that was my mission.

Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?

It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance.

I am haunted by the clear knowledge that, in the end, evil always triumphs.

Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day.

Wars are all fought by men who either believe they are right or who have no other choice. How they fight defines who they are when the blood stops flowing.

Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.