Sourced and curated.

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1918

★ 6.9

There are no atheists in the fox holes.

William Thomas Cummings

1943

★ 6.9

Political literature

War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.

Karl Von Clausewitz

On War · 1833

★ 6.8

Historical literature

If the Persians hide the sun, the battle will be in shade rather than sunlight.

Herodotus

430 BC

★ 6.3

Carthage must be destroyed.

Cato the Elder

Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives · 149 BC

★ 6.3

Song · Protest song · Soul music

War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.

Edwin Starr

War · 1970

★ 6.3

War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it.

Benito Mussolini

1932

★ 6.1

In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.

Douglas MacArthur

1951

★ 6.1

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Dulce et Decorum Est · 1920

★ 6.0

Film · Psychological drama (film) · War (film) · Psychological drama · War

Terminate...with extreme prejudice.

Civilian

Apocalypse Now · 1979

★ 5.4

There are no warlike peoples-just warlike leaders.

Ralph J. Bunche

1950

★ 5.3

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.

George S. Patton

Patton · 1969

★ 5.3

Speech · Military speech

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

1933

★ 5.2

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

John Updike

Self-Consciousness · 1989

★ 5.1

God has pity on kindergarten children. He has less pity on school children. And on grownups he has no pity at all, he leaves them alone, and sometimes they must crawl on all fours in the burning sand to reach the first-aid station covered with blood.

Yehuda Amichai

God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children · 1955

★ 5.0

Philosophical literature

Make war that we may live in peace.

Aristotle

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 4.9

Laws are silent in time of war.

Cicero

Pro Milone · 52 BC

★ 4.8

War is to man as motherhood is to woman.

Benito Mussolini

1934

★ 4.5

Essay · Political literature

Warfare... Is just an invention, older and more widespread than the jury system, but none the less an invention.

Margaret Mead

1940

★ 4.5

I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do. They probably have not seen the bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh...What separates me from the pacifists is that I hate the Nazis more than I hate war.

Wars, conflict - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!

1943

★ 4.4

Film · Comedy (film) · Comedy

Henri Verdoux

Monsieur Verdoux · 1947

★ 4.4

Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one, and war is a link in God's world order. In him, the noblest virtues of man, courage and renunciation, devotion to duty and willingness to sacrifice, unfold with the institution of life. Without the war, the world would become bogged down in materialism.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

1880

★ 4.3

Biography · Historical literature

Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.

Suetonius

★ 3.9

Film · Action (film) · Thriller (film) · Action · Thriller

Yes, the purpose of war is to serve a political end, but the true nature of war is to serve itself.

Hunter

Crimson Tide · 1995

★ 3.9

Historical literature

No one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons. However, I suppose the god must have wanted this to happen.

Herodotus

Histories · 430 BC

★ 3.8

He is wise who tries everything before arms.

Terence

The Eunuch · 161 BC

★ 3.8

Play · Tragedy (play)

Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It's sprightly waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible.

William Shakespeare

Coriolanus · 1616

★ 3.8

For what can war, but endless war still breed?

John Milton

1674

★ 3.8

Personal journal

God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.

Voltaire

1750

★ 3.8

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

George Washington

1790

★ 3.8

Pamphlet · Political literature

No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

James Madison

1795

★ 3.8

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

Abraham Lincoln

1864

★ 3.8

Film · Black comedy (film) · War (film) · Black comedy · War

You're talking about mass murder, General, not war!

President Merkin Muffley

Dr. Strangelove · 1964

★ 3.8

Film · Black comedy (film) · War (film) · Black comedy · War

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!

President Merkin Muffley

Dr. Strangelove · 1964

★ 3.8

Film · War (film) · War

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy...was in us.

Chris

Platoon · 1986

★ 3.8

Film · War (film) · War

I am in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive and I'm not afraid.

Private Joker

Full Metal Jacket · 1987

★ 3.8

Novel · Satire

Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.

Voltaire

Candide · 1759

★ 3.7

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy.

John Adams

1780

★ 3.7

Four things greater than all things are,— Women and Horses and Power and War.

Rudyard Kipling

1890

★ 3.7

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

1951

★ 3.7

Historical literature

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

Barbara Tuchman

The Guns of August · 1962

★ 3.7

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

1962

★ 3.7

North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

Richard Nixon

1969

★ 3.7

Film · War (film) · War

Nobody asks to be a hero...it just sometimes turns out that way.

Eversmann

Black Hawk Down · 2001

★ 3.7

Presocratic fragment · Fragment · Philosophical literature

War is father of all and king of all. Some he reveals as gods, other as men; some he makes slaves, other free.

Heraclitus

★ 3.7

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?

Seneca

★ 3.6

Now tell us all about the war, And what they kill'd each other for.

Robert Southey

1805

★ 3.6

Newspaper

You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists.

Anatole France

1922

★ 3.6

War is like love, it always finds a way.

Bertolt Brecht

1939

★ 3.6

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle.

George Orwell

1941

★ 3.6

Personal journal

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

Brooks Atkinson

1951

★ 3.6

Magazine

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

Henry Kissinger

1969

★ 3.6

What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.

Allen Ginsberg

Graffiti 12th Cubicle Men's Room Syracuse Airport · 1973

★ 3.6

Novel · Western literature

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West · 1985

★ 3.6

War, he sung, is Toil and Trouble; Honour, but an empty Bubble. Never ending, still beginning, Fighting still, and still destroying; If the World be worth thy winning, Think, O think it worth enjoying.

John Dryden

1697

★ 3.5

Essay

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

Samuel Johnson

1758

★ 3.5

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at.

William Cowper

The Winter Morning Walk · 1785

★ 3.5

Yes, quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat if met where any bar is, Or help to half-a-crown.

Thomas Hardy

1902

★ 3.5

Poem · Epic poem

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

Carl Sandburg

1936

★ 3.5

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

Neville Chamberlain

1938

★ 3.5

Newspaper

I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain't a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks want to fight. Give them the guns.

Woody Guthrie

People's World · 1939

★ 3.5

The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

Douglas MacArthur

1940

★ 3.5

Speech · Military speech

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base.

1944

★ 3.5

Every gun that is made, ever 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.

1953

★ 3.5

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.

Enoch Powell

The Times of London · 1967

★ 3.5

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy, who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will. Before God I swear this creed: my rifle and myself are defenders of my country, we are the masters of our enemy, we are the saviors of my life. So be it, until there is no enemy, but peace. Amen.

Patton · 1969

★ 3.5

Film · War (film) · War

Full Metal Jacket

1987

★ 3.5

Film · War (film) · War

When I go home people'll ask me, "Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? Why, you some kinda war junkie?" I won't say a goddamn word. Why? They won't understand. They won't understand why we do it. They won't understand that it's about the man next to you, and that's it. That's all it is.

Hoot

Black Hawk Down · 2001

★ 3.5

Play · Drama (play)

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.

George Bernard Shaw

1903

★ 3.5

I gave my life for freedom-This I know: For those who bade me fight had told me so.

William Norman Ewer

1914

★ 3.5

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all.

Carl Sandburg

1918

★ 3.5

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.

Robert H. Jackson

1945

★ 3.5

Novel

In those days, when every male who could stand half-way erect was being shipped to Verdun to undergo a radical change of posture from the vertical to the eternal horizontal.

Gunter Grass

The Tin Drum · 1959

★ 3.5

Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow"...[Rule 2] is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China."

Bernard Montgomery

1962

★ 3.5

TV news · TV program

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion.

Walter Cronkite

1968

★ 3.5

Political literature

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a very good chance of eventually being fought.

George F. Kennan

1977

★ 3.5

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Tim O'Brien

1987

★ 3.5

I think all men recognize that in time of war the citizen must surrender some rights for the common good which he is entitled to enjoy in time of peace. But, sir, the right to control their own government according to constitutional forms is not one of the rights that the citizens of this country are called upon to surrender in time of war.

Robert M. La Follette

1917

★ 3.4

Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.

Douglas Haig

1918

★ 3.4

Sermon · Religious literature

I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

1933

★ 3.4

Poem · War poetry

In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school- Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among The people we had killed and never seen. When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; When we died they said, "Our casualties were low."

Randall Jarrell

1948

★ 3.4

Treatise · Military treatise

The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities... It is best to win without fighting.

Sun Tzu

The Art of War · 490 BC

★ 3.3

A leader who doesn't hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

Golda Meir

1970

★ 2.8

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

William Tecumseh Sherman

1864

★ 2.7

Novel

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father, or brother was killed, wounded, or reported missing in action.

Joseph Heller

Catch-22 · 1961

★ 2.7

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.

Thomas Hobbes

Leviathan · 1651

★ 2.3

Film · Action (film) · Thriller (film) · Action · Thriller

In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.

Hunter

Crimson Tide · 1995

★ 2.3

There never was a good War, or a bad Peace.

Benjamin Franklin

1783

★ 2.2

Lecture

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

Mao Zedong

1938

★ 2.2

Give brief orders; speeches that are too long are likely to be forgotten.

Abu Bakr

634

★ 2.1

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee

1862

★ 2.1

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia · 1938

★ 2.1

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia · 1938

★ 2.1

Film · War (film) · War

I am determined to serve and give my life for my country.

General Kuribayashi

Letters from Iwo Jima · 2006

★ 2.1

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Abraham Lincoln

1848

★ 2.0

Interview · Magazine

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

Albert Einstein

1945

★ 2.0

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

I won't have cowards in my army.

We go to gain a little patch of ground That hath in it no profit but the name.

Patton · 1969

★ 2.0

Play · Tragedy (play)

William Shakespeare

Hamlet · 1616

★ 1.9

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

1815

★ 1.9

Lecture

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.

Henry Maine

1887

★ 1.9

War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Thomas Hardy

1904

★ 1.9

Interview · Newspaper

The war has used up words.

Henry James

1915

★ 1.9

There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians.

Robert Graves

Goodbye to All That · 1929

★ 1.9

Older men declare war. But it is youth who must fight and die.

Herbert Hoover

1944

★ 1.9

The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

It's an odd feeling, farewell. There is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested, for courage. And if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, but for how well we can endure loneliness.

1953

★ 1.9

Film · Romantic drama (film) · Epic (film) · Romantic drama · Epic

Karen

Out of Africa · 1985

★ 1.9

Film · Comedy (film) · Comedy

Why is it that if a man kills another man in battle, it's called heroic, yet if he kills a man in the heat of passion, it's called murder?

Glen

Wayne's World · 1992

★ 1.9

Film · War (film) · Thriller (film) · War · Thriller

But you realize every time you suit up, every time we go out, it's life or death. You roll the dice...and you deal with it.

Sergeant JT Sanborn

The Hurt Locker · 2008

★ 1.9

Film · War (film) · War

Wars are not won by evacuations.

Tommy

Dunkirk · 2017

★ 1.9

No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

1871

★ 1.9

It is easier to make war than to make peace.

Georges Clemenceau

1919

★ 1.9

Newspaper

We hear war called murder. It is not: it is suicide.

Ramsay MacDonald

1930

★ 1.9

A good plan violenty executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.

I don't want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy. We're going to hold on to him by the nose and we're gonna kick him in the ass. We're gonna kick the hell out of him all the time and we're gonna go through him like crap through a goose!

1947

★ 1.9

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War

Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

Patton · 1969

★ 1.9

Film · Biography (film) · War (film) · Biography · War