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I am for peace: but when I
speak, they are for war.

Psalms 120:7, King James Version
Holy Bible

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So in the simple blessing of a rainbow,
In the bevelled edge of a sunlit mirrow,
I have seen visible, Death's artifact
Like a soldier's ribbon on a tunic tacked.

Pathology of Colours
Dannie Abse

Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up.
Dean Acheson

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
John Adams

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.
John Adams

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on a dunghill.
Richard Aldington

Man, I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.
Muhammad Ali

No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill, and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.
Muhammad Ali

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?
Muhammad Ali

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov

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If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
Joan Baez

War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin

One may know how to gain a victory, and know not how to use it.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca

After a long silence, Dodge cleared his throat. I think I speak for all of us when I say, 'Huh?
Seeing Redd
Frank Beddor

And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.
Seeing Redd
Frank Beddor

For now. But if I ever decide you're useless, you are a dead man. To be killed by you is to be desired more than a life excluded from your service. Bravo. Her Imperial Viciousness laughed with genuine feeling. Bravo!
Seeing Redd
Frank Beddor

Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dance corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy.
Seeing Redd
Frank Beddor

Well now, the scholar went on, I'm just an old fuddy-duddy who could use a tan, so you needn't grant my opinion any authority, but I consider the queendom lucky that a handful of Milliners and their children lived incognito among the population during Redd's tyranny.
Seeing Redd
Frank Beddor

All war represents is a failure of diplomacy.
Tony Benn

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
Napoléon Bonaparte

He who fears being conquered is certain of defeat.
Napoléon Bonaparte

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
Omar Bradley

The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
Omar Bradley

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundations of America.
George W. Bush

These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of America's resolve.
George W. Bush

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Veni, vidi, vici.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
Julius Caesar

Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.*
*Attribution questionable.
Winston Churchill

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.*
*Attribution questionable.
Winston Churchill

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill

An unjust peace is better than a just war.
Cicero

The sinews of war: unlimited money.
Cicero

The leader is not just a scorekeeper. He is responsible for creating something new and better.
Wilbur L. Creech

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Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.
Salvador Dali

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Conquer, but don't triumph.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
Thomas Edison

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Albert Einstein

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
Albert Einstein

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Albert Einstein

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.
Zhou Enlai

Man tell us our lives are free of danger. We stay at home. They go to war. Rubbish. I'd rather face three assaults. In line of battle, than bear one child.
Euripides

Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head.
Euripides

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All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.
François Fénelon

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.
Benjamin Franklin

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There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for.
Mahatma Gandhi

[The] city of New York and the United States of America is much stronger than any group of barbaric terrorists, that our democracy, that our rule of law, that our strength and our willingness to defend ourselves will ultimately prevail.
Rudy Giuliani

I have never advocated war except as a means of peace.
Ulysses S. Grant

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- H -
Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain, of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.
Consolation Grook
Piet Hein

In modern war ... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.
George Herbert

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
Herodotus

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.
Napoleon Hill

Being in jail is by far the hardest thing I have ever done. During the past several days, I have had a lot of time to think and I believe that I am learning and growing from this experience ... I would hope going forward that the public and the media will focus on more important things like the men and women serving our country in Iraq and other places around the world.
Paris Hilton

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Adolf Hitler

I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war.
Abbie Hoffman

There's no such thing as interacting in society without it being a political act, the most fearsome of which is war. But all other acts are political, too. Even if you say, I don't believe in politics, you've just acted. You've acted for the status quo.
Abbie Hoffman

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
Herbert Hoover

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Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson

The first casualty when war comes is truth.
Hiram Johnson

I have not yet begun to fight!
John Paul Jones

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Under the hypnosis of war hysteria, with a pusillanimous Congress rubber-stamping every whim of the White House, we passed the withholding tax.
Vivien Kellems

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.
United Nations on September 25, 1961.
John F. Kennedy

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
John F. Kennedy

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
John F. Kennedy

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
Martin Luther King Jr.

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
Martin Luther King Jr.

We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
Jeane Kirkpatrick

No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
Henry Kissinger

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As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Barbara Lee

I wish the press were paying more attention to the erosion of the Constitution and the slippery slope that we're getting into, by giving up the right of the Congress to talk about when and how and where we go to war.
Barbara Lee

It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines.
Stanislaw Lem

I could be, you know, the person that shows little kids that giving up isn't something that you should do.
Jessica Lynch

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To command is to serve, nothing more and nothing less.
Andre Malraux

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann

Maybe 100.
Discussing how many years U.S. troops could remain in Iraq on January 3, 2008.
John McCain

Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.
Colman McCarthy

I don't celebrate the 4th of July because there never should have been a war with Britain.
Colman McCarthy

Wars aren't stopped by fighting wars, any more than you can fight fire with fire. You fight fire with water. You fight violence with nonviolence.
Colman McCarthy

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
George McGovern

The Establishment center ... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.
George McGovern

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not the battlefields of Vietnam.
Marshall McLuhan

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
John Stuart Mill

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The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The army is always the same. The sun and the moon change. The army knows no seasons.
Frank Nugent

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You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.
Third presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida on October 22, 2012.
Barack Obama

In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the condition most favorable to one's own side.
Kenichi Ohmae

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
George Orwell

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The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
George Patton

I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi (Germany's) war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich.' ... I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.
Letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2014.
Tom Perkins

If you didn't like Darfur, you're going to hate Baghdad.
Warning of the consequences of an early troop withdrawal from Iraq. Quoted on August 14, 2007.
David Petraeus

War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
Albert Pike

Diplomacy in general does not resolve conflicts. Wars end not due to peace processes, but due to one side giving up.
Daniel Pipes

Giving back involves a certain amount of giving up.
Colin Powell

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow

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You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin

Nations do not mistrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they mistrust each other.
Ronald Reagan

Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment. This is history's greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the creation of time.
Matt Ridley

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it.
Will Rogers

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.
Will Rogers

Sweat saves blood.
Erwin Rommel

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

There are also unknown unknowns.
Donald Rumsfeld

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.
Bertrand Russell

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War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
Jean-Paul Sartre

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.

King John
William Shakespeare

The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics.
Albert Schweitzer

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
Muriel Spark

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble?
Benjamin Spock

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

A wound born in victory is a wound without pain.
Publilius Syrus

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We must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
Margaret Thatcher

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.
Henry David Thoreau

I fired him [MacArthur] because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President ... I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.
Time Magazine
Harry S. Truman

We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.
Diary
Harry S. Truman

He's not a war hero. ... He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured.
Donald Trump on John McCain, interview at Family Leadership Summit, Ames, Iowa, July 18, 2015.
Donald Trump

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara W. Tuchman

All war is deception.
Sun Tzu

The general who wins a battle makes many calculations ... here the battle is fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus do many calculations lead to victory, and few to defeat.
Sun Tzu

The successful person has unusual skill at dealing with conflict and ensuring the best outcome for all.
Sun Tzu

Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
Sun Tzu

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It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire

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I have brought you to the ring, now dance the best you can!
Battle of Falkirk on July 22, 1298.
William Wallace

If we don't end war, war will end us.
H. G. Wells

I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.
William Westmoreland

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
William Westmoreland

It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.
Fred Woodworth

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Politics is war carried out without bloodshed, while war is politics carried out with bloodshed.
Mao Zedong

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