War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
~ Walter Bagehot

O can't you see, brother -- Death's a congested road for fighters now, and hero a cheap label.
~ C. D. Andrews

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
~ Hannah Arendt

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.
~ Margot Asquith

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
~ Charles Baudelaire

It takes twenty years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.
~ Baudouin I

If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits.
~ Ruth Benedict

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
~ Tony Benn

The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.
~ Friedrich Von Bernhardi

If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.
~ Hans A. Bethe

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
~ Otto Von Bismarck

Hell and damnation, life is such fun with a ragged greatcoat and a Jerry gun!
~ Alexander Blok

War is like love, it always finds a way.
~ Bertolt Brecht

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can.
~ Winston Churchill

The sinews of war, a limitless supply of money.
~ Marcus T. Cicero

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.
~ Karl Von Clausewitz

A ''just war'' is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.
~ Alexander Cockburn

That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together.
~ Noel Coward

Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage. That is all true. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul a people.
~ Rebecca Harding Davis

War is the trade of Kings.
~ John Dryden