Quotes on Fighting and War
Opinionated quotations from the famous and not-so-famous.

My favorite gum.

Extra Fruit Sensations (Sweet Tropical).

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

Herbert Clark Hoover

Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.

Erwin Rommel

Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

Herman Goering (high-ranking Nazi)

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

John Adams

When you join the military, you sign over your life and your freewill. They can move you wherever they want, experiment on you, send you into combat to die, etc… So although it sounds like a brave and adventurous move to see the world, your world actually grows smaller because you can only be where they order you to be. Also basic training requires some degree of breaking you down and remolding you. That’s brainwashing. The mental focus is on killing, violence, ruthlessness, cunning, machismo, and the enemy. That mindset puts you squarely in the realm of STS / Service-to-Self frequencies.

Montalk

Leaving esoterics aside, if you look to what is best for you in these situations where you are being abused, at the very least what you will do is stop the abuse. And that will be good for both you and your abuser. For even an abuser is abused when his abuse is allowed to continue.

This is not healing to the abuser, but damaging. For if the abuser finds that his abuse is acceptable, what has he learned? Yet if the abuser finds that his abuse will be accepted no more, what has he been allowed to discover?

Therefore, treating others with love does not necessarily mean allowing others to do as they wish.

Parents learn this early with children. Adults are not so quick to learn it with other adults, nor nation with nation.

Yet despots cannot be allowed to flourish, but must be stopped in their despotism. Love of Self, and love of the despot, demands it.

God from Conversations with God (Book 1) through Neale Donald Walsch (adapted)

The problem with sports and war is that God is on everyone's side.

Duane Alan Hahn

Part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.

Norman Vincent Peale

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

Jeannette Rankin

You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force.

Publilius Syrus

There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it.

Havelock Ellis

Join the army, see the world, meet interesting people, and kill them.

Unknown

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.

David Friedman

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

Salvor Hardin

Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.

Margaret Mitchell

All war represents a failure of diplomacy.

Tony Benn

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

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share in the guilt for the dead.

General Omar Bradley

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Virginia Woolf

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Peace is not God's gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other.

Elie Wiesel

You may ask, "if love is all there is, how can man ever justify war?"

Sometimes man must go to war to make the grandest statement about who man truly is: he who abhors war.

There are times when you may have to give up Who You Are to be Who You Are.

There are masters who have taught: you cannot have it all until you are willing to give it all up. Thus, to "have" yourself as a man of peace, you may have to give up the idea of yourself as a man who never goes to war. History has called upon men for such decisions.

This does not mean that if you are being hurt, you have to "hurt back." (Nor does it mean so in relationships between nations.) It simply means that to allow another to continually inflict damage may not be the best thing for your Self or the other.

This should put to rest some pacifist theories that highest love requires no forceful response to what you consider evil.

God from Conversations with God (Book 1) through Neale Donald Walsch (adapted)

It is respect for life which sometimes makes war necessary, for it is through war against immediate impending evil, it is through defense against immediate threat to another life, that you make a statement of Who You Are in relationship to that.

You have a right under highest moral law, indeed, you have an obligation under that law, to stop aggression on the person of another, or yourself.

This does not mean that killing as a punishment is appropriate, nor as retribution, nor as a means of settling petty differences.

God from Conversations with God (Book 1) through Neale Donald Walsch (adapted)

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

Martin Amis

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

Albert Einstein

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Desiderius Erasmus

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

Abbie Hoffman

It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.

Andre Gide

In schools all over the world, little boys learn that their country is the greatest in the world, and the highest honor that could befall them would be to defend it heroically someday. The fact that empathy has traditionally been conditioned out of boys facilitates their obedience to leaders who order them to kill strangers.

Myriam Miedzian

Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. 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

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

Douglas MacArthur

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.

Oscar Wilde

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