c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
He says we need to live in the real world, where war and death are a reality, not pretend.
— Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four
Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose kind of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It's a word like house or table or any other word. Only it's a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it? No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.
— Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.
— Alan Moore, Watchmen
The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;Or close the wall up with our English dead!In peace there's nothing so becomes a manAs modest stillness and humility:But when the blast of war blows in our ears,Then imitate the action of the tiger.
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
If your opponent is of choleric temper,  seek to irritate him.  Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.
— Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
— Robert E. Lee
Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors.
— Lori Goodwin
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
— Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
Ideas and not battles mark the forward progress of mankind.
— L. Ron Hubbard
Love is a conquest! Love is war!
— Marissa Meyer, Fairest
What the war did to dreamers.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Too bad people can't always be playing music, maybe then there wouldn't be any more wars.
— Margot Benary-Isbert, Rowan Farm
I learned to play the instruments of war," he said, "and paint in blood.
— Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.
— Winston S. Churchill
Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
There's so many different worlds, so many different suns. And we have just one world, but we live in different ones.
— Mark Knopfler, Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms
There is one fairly good reason for fighting - and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them. 
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.
— Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Everyone has the best of feelings towards mankind in general, but not towards the individual man. We'll kill men, but we want to save mankind. And that isn't right, your Reverence. The world will be an evil place as long as people don't believe in other people.
— Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large
I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.
— Sarah  Miller, The Lost Crown
For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.
— Carl Sagan
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them.
— Laurence Binyon
There's no such thing as civilization. The word just means the art of living in cities.
— Roger Zelazny, The Great Book of Amber
Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.
— George S. Patton Jr.
My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure.
— Charles Bukowski, South of No North
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
— Erich Maria Remarque
We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children
— Howard Zinn
I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.
— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Attack is the secret of defense
—  defense is the planning of an attack.
All wars are sacred,” he said. “To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and the fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ’save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ’down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
— Ronald Reagan
Perhaps ... To R.A.L.Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,And I shall see that still the skies are blue,And feel one more I do not live in vain,Although bereft of you.Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet,Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,Though You have passed away.Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,And crimson roses once again be fair,And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,Although You are not there.But though kind Time may many joys renew,There is one greatest joy I shall not knowAgain, because my heart for loss of YouWas broken, long ago.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
It is a pity that there are no big creatures to prey on humanity. If there were enough dragons and rocs, perhaps mankind would turn its might against them. Unfortunately man is preyed upon by microbes, which are too small to be appreciated.
— T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
— George Washington, The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources 1745-1799 Volume 39 (General Index O-Z List of Letters) - Leather Bound
It was not well to drive men into final corners
—  at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.
This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular.
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.
— Sebastian Junger, War
Alek said, "Do you think I'm being a fool?" "I think you're trying to do something good. But doing good is rarely easy, and no weapon has ever stopped a war.
— Scott Westerfeld, Goliath
When a man carries an instrument of violence, he'll always find the justification to use it. If we really want to escape this war, we have to stop bringing it with us.
— Brian K. Vaughan, Saga, Vol. 1
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war.
— William Faulkner, A Fable
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
Peace is such hard work. Harder than war. It takes way more effort to forgive than to kill.
— Rae Carson, The Bitter Kingdom
Politics is war without blood, while war is politics with blood.
— Mao Zedong
Killing people is easier than it should be.” Dad put on his beret. “Staying alive is harder.
— Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory
You don't get it, Clary. You don't understand what it's like to live always at war, to grow up with battle and sacrifice. I guess it's not your fault. It's just how you were brought up-
— Cassandra Clare, City of Glass
Let me ask you one questionIs your money that goodWill it buy you forgivenessDo you think that it couldI think you will findWhen your death takes its tollAll the money you madeWill never buy back your soul
— Bob Dylan, The Bob Dylan Scrapbook: 1956-1966
You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.
— Naomi Klein
In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?'No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.
— Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Some must be warriors, that others may live in peace. 
— Mercedes Lackey, Exile's Honor
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
— Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.
— Mahatma Gandhi, Non-violence in Peace and War 1942-49
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …
— George Orwell
It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.
— Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
There is no moral difference between a Stealth bomber and a suicide bomber. They both kill innocent people for political reasons.
— Tony Benn
To a happy war!' laughter echoed with all the insane glee of an army of psychopaths.
— Stuart Hill, The Cry of the Icemark
War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other's children.
— Jimmy Carter, The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture
Our hearts, the war.Her body, the battlefield.
— Rick Yancey, The Last Star
I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument?
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
— Oscar Wilde
It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
— Albert Camus
To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Sisters in battle, I am shield and blade to you. As I breathe, your enemies will know no sanctuary. While I live, your cause is mine.
— Leigh Bardugo, Wonder Woman: Warbringer
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.
— Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Ones
What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes necessary someone says: war is large-scale murder, us at our worst, the stupidest guy doing the cruelest thing to the weakest being.
— George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
— Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
In this world, whenever there is light, there are also shadows. As long as the concept of winners exist, there must also be losers. The selfish desire of wanting to maintain peace causes wars and hatred is born to protect love.
— Masashi Kishimoto
Wait, I got it. We, uh, won the battle and lost the war, or was it the other way around? 'Cause around here, it's hard to tell sometimes.
— Kami Garcia, Beautiful Creatures
you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty. 
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?
— Arundhati Roy
--Why are we fighting them?--They're mad. We're sane.--How do we know?--That we're sane?--Yes.--Am I sane?--To all appearances.--And you, do you consider yourself sane?--I do.--Well, there you have it.--But don't they also consider themselves sane?--I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane.--How must that make them feel?--Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.
— Donald Barthelme
All other trades are contained in that of war.Is that why war endures?No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.That's your notion.The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.
— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
War could bond men like a magnet, but like a magnet it could repel them, too. The things they saw, the things they did. Sometimes they just wanted to forget.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Remember that even in war there is a time for restraint. A time to hold back your sword.
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Code of Claw
Station is the paradox of the world of my people, the limitation of our power within the hunger for power. It is gained through treachery and invites treachery against those who gain it. Those most powerful in Menzoberranzan spend their days watching over their shoulders, defending against the daggers that would find their backs. Their deaths usually come from the front." -Drizzt Do'Urden
— R.A. Salvatore, Homeland
Never send a battalion to take a hill if a regiment is available.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
War is not the answer, for only love can conquer hate
— Marvin Gaye
It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
Have you ever heard of the theory that it is better for one man to die than an entire nation to suffer? Do you believe that to be true? Is it ever okay to take a life in hopes of saving others?
— Sara B. Larson, Defy
Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings? My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me. The young king [crown prince Henry, †1183] and the count of Britanny [prince Geoffrey, †1186] sleep in dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to be irremediably tormented by the memory of the dead. Two sons remain to my solace, who today survive to punish me, miserable and condemned. King Richard [the Lionheart] is held in chains [in captivity with Emperor Henry VI of Germany]. His brother, John, depletes his kingdom with iron [the sword] and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord has turned cruel to me and attacked me with the harshness of his hand. Truly his wrath battles against me: my sons fight amongst themselves, if it is a fight where where one is restrained in chains, the other, adding sorrow to sorrow, undertakes to usurp the kingdom of the exile by cruel tyranny. Good Jesus, who will grant that you protect me in hell and hide me until your fury passes, until the arrows which are in me cease, by which my whole spirit is sucked
— Eleanor of Aquitaine
Look at me!’ I screeched. ‘Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You’re not questioning me now, this isn’t your work, I’m not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I’m just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch!
— Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity
It is not an easy thing to be a woman and love with the whole heart: which men do not understand -- having many loves, and delighting in danger and war.
— M.M. Kaye
He thinks Goliath can end the war," Alek managed at last. "The man wants peace!" "As do we all," Count Volger said. "But there are many ways to end a war. Some are more peaceful than others.
— Scott Westerfeld, Goliath
You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one held a gun to your head. This is true, but because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight one of America’s wars, I am entitled to speak, to say, I belong to a fucked situation.
— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
— Erasmus, Adagia. Lateinisch / Deutsch
A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
— H.G. Wells
The use of force is always an answer to problems...[It] isn't an attractive answer, though.
— David Drake, The Voyage
Not that she's a political animal, she's just an ordinary woman, but as a woman she's of the view that you don't bring children into the world to have them shot.
— Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone
Avoid teams at all cost. Keep your circle small. Never join a group that has a name.
— George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. 
— Winston S. Churchill
Be where your enemy is not.
— Sun Tzu
There’ll always be wars because men love wars. Women don’t, but men do..
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all secretly attracted to violence.
— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.
— James Oliver Curwood, The Grizzly King
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Their Silver war is being paid for in Red blood.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
It is not enough to live together in peace, with one race on its knees.
— Daniel H. Wilson, Robopocalypse
Give me liberty or give me death.' A human named Patrick Henry said that. I wonder if the Yeerks knew before they came to conquer Earth that humans said things like that. I wonder if the Yeerks knew what they were getting into." -Aximili Esgarrouth Isthill
— Katherine Applegate, The Alien
Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.
— Sherwood Smith, King's Shield
Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it...
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.
— William Faulkner, A Fable
And just so you know, the invaders are always the bad guys. Always.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
War is not nice.
— Barbara Bush
I am a war president.
— George W. Bush
And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
War made the state, and the state made war
— Charles Tilly
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
— Don DeLillo, Mao II
A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. written by himself
Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.
— Robert Fulghum
War is always an adventure to those who've never seen it.
— Anthony  Ryan, Blood Song
War means fighting, and fighting means killing.
— Nathan Bedford Forrest
I'll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I'll even 'hari-kari' if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!
— Alan Alda
Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12
— Erich Maria Remarque
Love is hateWar is PeaceNo is YesAnd we're all free.
— Tracy Chapman
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true...
— Thomas Paine
When youre sharing a foxhole with another man, you don't worry about what color he is, just whether or not he will protect your back
— Lee Benson
There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
— George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
The German people in its whole character is not warlike, but rather soldierly, that is, while they do not want war, they are not frightened by the thoughts of it.
— Adolf Hitler, The speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939
I said, 'I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.' Ah!' said [Captain], 'I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade, and sham-fight. Yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed, or crippled for life, it has a very different look.' Do you know what they fought about?' said I. No,' he said, 'that is more than a horse can understand, but the enemy must have been awfully wicked people, if it was right to go all that way over the sea on purpose to kill them.
— Anna Sewell, Black Beauty
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless
If there is a war to be fought, we don’t consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.
— Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
That was the day the ancient songs of blood and war spilled from a hole in the skyAnd there was a long moment as we listened and fell silent in our griefand then one by one, we stood talland came togetherand began to sing of life and love and all that is good and trueAnd I will never forget that day when the ancient songs died because there was no one in the world to sing them.
— Brian Andreas, Traveling Light: Stories & Drawings for a Quiet Mind
In the art of war, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the approaching battles. But if you know only yourself and not the enemy, for every victory, there will also be defeat.
— Emily Thorne
My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.
— Ferdinand Foch
You gotta admit, it's a messed-up world when going to war is safer than staying home.
— Paul Langan, The Fallen
At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder.At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
I saw Oberon charge into the fray on a huge black warhorse, glamour swirling around him, and sweep a hand toward the thickest of the fighting. Vines and roots erupted from the ground, coiling around the Iron fey, strangling them or pulling them beneath the earth. Atop a rise, Mab raised her arms, and a savage whirlwind swept across the field, freezing fey solid or impaling them with ice shards. The armies of Summer and Winter howled with renewed vigor and threw themselves at the enemy.
— Julie Kagawa, The Iron Queen
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.
— Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
Knowing when to fight is just as important as knowing how.
— Terry Goodkind, Faith of the Fallen
I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker.
— Albert Einstein
Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull.  Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
— Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?'If you were run over by a railroad train your death wouldn’t sanctify the railroad company, would it?' asked Rhett and his voice sounded as if he were humbly seeking information.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to his moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
— Eleanor Roosevelt, Eleanor and Franklin
Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
Wars come and go
—  politics endure.
The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.
— Chris Hedges
Where you are born should not dictate your potential as a human being.
— Roméo Dallaire, They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers
Saints preserve us,' Dr. Kellen said, and squeezed Galen's shoulder. 'What have we done to our youth?
— Jessica Day George, Princess of the Midnight Ball
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
When two brothers are busy fighting, an evil man can easily attack and rob their poor mother. Mankind should always stay united, standing shoulder to shoulder so evil can never cheat and divide them.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Intelligence won wars, not brute force.
— Rick Riordan, The Staff of Serapis
The love of conflict is most evident when opposing forces join sides to defeat the peacemaker.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor'd rage.
— William Shakespeare, Henry V
you can't say civilization dont advance, in every war they kill you in a new way
— Will Rogers
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
Is killing a known terrorist wrong? I ask this, did the terrorist allow any of his victims quarter? No, then allow him no quarter, and hoist the black flag.
— T.R. Wallace
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
— George Orwell, 1984
But when they made love he was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in 
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
They won the war but lost the peace,
— Jonathan Maberry, Rot & Ruin
...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
— George Orwell, 1984
Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.
— Kate Morton, The House at Riverton
It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.
— Ron Paul, End the Fed
One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are some good things about it. Just as self-respect and pride bring out the best in an individual, pride in family, pride in teammates, pride in hometown bring out the best in groups of people. War brings out the kind of pride in country that encourages its citizens in the direction of excellence and it encourages them to be ready to die for it. At no time do people work so well together to achieve the same goal as they do in wartime. Maybe that's enough to make patriotism eligible to be considered a virtue. If only I could get out of my mind the most patriotic people who ever lived, the Nazi Germans.
— Andy Rooney, MY WAR
This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
— Albert Einstein
Peace be with you," I said, and as I turned to resume my journey with Coyote, I added under my breath, "and asskicking be with me.
— Kevin Hearne, Hexed
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over - years, Mary. And in those years millions of hearts will break.
— L.M. Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
Sometime, somewhere, life always comes to a fight, and peace always comes to an end.
— Rachel Caine, Lord of Misrule
It is the story that lies around the edges of the photographs, or at the end of newspaper account. It's about the lies we tell others to protect them, and about the lies we tell ourselves in order not to acknowledge what we can't bear: that we are alive, for instance, and eating lunch, while bombs are falling, and refugees are crammed into camps, and the news comes toward us every hour of the day. And what, in the end, do we do?
— Sarah Blake, The Postmistress
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
— Mark Twain
This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
In theory, sure, Gregor could still go home. Pack up his three-year-old sister, Boots, get his mom out of the hospital, where she was recovering from the plague, and have his bat, Ares, fly them back up to the laudry room of their appartment building in New York City. Ares, his bond, who saved his life numerous times and who had had nothing but suffering since he had met Gregor. He tried to imagine the parting. "Well, Ares, it's been great. I'm heading home now. I know by leaving I'm completely dooming to annihilation everbody who's helped me down here, but I'm really not up for this whole war thing anymore. So, fly you high, you know?" Like that would ever happen.
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Code of Claw
My Gullah grandfather is bringing a bag of dust to a vampire war. I feel better.
— Elle Jasper, Afterlight
Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that 5000 men could not have done – and the traitors [have been] exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.
— Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc
Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense--what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption