war
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘war’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“The rule for effective governance is simple. It is one Ronald Reagan knew by heart. And one that he successfully employed with Social Security and the Cold War. When there is a problem, you fix it. That is the job you have been sent to do and you cannot wait for someone else to do…
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“She doesn’t understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.” -Joan Rivers
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“I’m finding myself really angry over spending and the deficit. I’m finding myself really angry over what’s happening in the Middle East, the decision to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. I’m angry about cap and trade. And I’ve been on record for a long time on the failed war on drugs.” -Gary Johnson
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“War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.” -Desiderius Erasmus
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“The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.” -E. B. White
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“For far too long we’ve allowed the other side to paint us as racist, as sexist, inhumane war mongers – well, today as a conservative black Republican and former solider, I’m here to set that record straight.” -Allen West
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“War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.” -Paul Valery
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“As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.” -John Stuart Mill
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“Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.” -H. G. Wells
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“Be polite write diplomatically even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.” -Otto von Bismarck
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“As this long and difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible.” -Richard M. Nixon
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“In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who’s never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don’t look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.” -Steven Spielberg
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“God employs several translators some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice.” -John Donne
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“How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.” -Karl Kraus
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“War kills men, and men deplore the loss but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.” -Charles Caleb Colton
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“The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.” -Washington Irving
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“Americans are blessed with great plenty we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine.” -Adam Schiff
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“Australians are coffee snobs. An influx of Italian immigrants after World War II ensured that – we probably had the word ‘cappuccino’ about 20 years before America. Cafe culture is really big for Aussies. We like to work hard, but we take our leisure time seriously.” -Hugh Jackman
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“I guess if people couldn’t profit from war I don’t think there would be war.” -Lily Tomlin
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“When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam…
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“War is good when good survives and evil is crushed. If you don’t crush evil then evil will get you.” -Ted Nugent
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“Hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror. By bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to the violent, they are making America more secure.” -George W. Bush
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“Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.” -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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“Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.” -Al McGuire
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“A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won’t get a bikini wax.” -Rita Rudner
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“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.” -Heraclitus
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“War is cruelty, and none can make it gentle.” -Gilbert Parker
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“See, that’s why Barack’s running: to end the war in Iraq responsibly – to build an economy that lifts every family, to make sure health care is available for every American – and to make sure that every child in this nation has a world-class education all the way from preschool to college.” -Michelle Obama
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“No more war! Never again war! If you wish to be brothers, drop your weapons.” -Pope Paul VI
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“In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention.” -Thomas Aquinas
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“We had good white friends who advised us against taking the war path. My friend and brother, Mr. Chapman, told us just how the war would end.” -Chief Joseph
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“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?” -Virginia Woolf
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“It is Barack Obama who is at war with this country. Recent events prove it. This is not a cliche. It’s not a figure of speech. Obama is at war with the U.S. economy.” -Rush Limbaugh
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“All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” -Kurt Vonnegut
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“A peace that depends on fear is nothing but a suppressed war.” -Henry Van Dyke
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“What a country calls its vital… interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.” -Simone Weil
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“Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.” -John Steinbeck
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“War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.” -Sophocles
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“I don’t believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it’s wrong. I don’t have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don’t have that much respect for Bush. He’s about war, I’m not about war – a lot of people aren’t about war.” -Avril Lavigne
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“The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.” -George C. Marshall
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“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.” -George Santayana
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“Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would yield every honor which has been accorded by war.” -Douglas MacArthur
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“War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.” -James Madison
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“Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.” -Reinhold Niebuhr
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“War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.” -Alice Walker
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“The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual – when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions – it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer
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“Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.” -Pope Benedict XVI
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“War is very sad and small life is pathetically fragile at times.” -Henry Rollins
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“Nowadays it is the fashion to emphasize the horrors of the last war. I didn’t find it so horrible. There are just as horrible things happening all round us today, if only we had eyes to see them.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.” -Noah Webster
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“As a result of my philosophy, I wasn’t even upset about Hitler. I was willing to go to war to knock him off, but I didn’t hate him. I hated what he was doing.” -Albert Ellis
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“The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.” -John Maynard Keynes
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“Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.” -Susan B. Anthony
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“An honorable Peace is and always was my first wish! I can take no delight in the effusion of human Blood but, if this War should continue, I wish to have the most active part in it.” -John Paul Jones
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“In war, events of importance are the result of trivial causes.” -Julius Caesar
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“Be convinced that to be happy means to be free and that to be free means to be brave. Therefore do not take lightly the perils of war.” -Thucydides
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“What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility – America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.” -Stephen King
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“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” -Jefferson Davis
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“The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.” -Adrienne Rich
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“No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.” -Henry Miller
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“War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.” -Anatole France
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“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” -Donald Rumsfeld
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“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.” -Will Durant
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“Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total… because it may well involve the whole world.” -Jean-Paul Sartre
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“The war… was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.” -Robert E. Lee
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“The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn’t make it.” -Henry A. Kissinger
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“Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation’s history and the world’s future.” -Joe Baca
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“The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.” -Samuel Butler
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“No nation ever had an army large enough to guarantee it against attack in time of peace, or ensure it of victory in time of war.” -Calvin Coolidge
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“The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am…
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“There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.” -Leon Trotsky
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“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.” -Edward Abbey
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“The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.” -Larry Elder
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“It is not only the living who are killed in war.” -Isaac Asimov
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“War on the other hand is such a terrible thing, that no man, especially a Christian man, has the right to assume the responsibility of starting it.” -Leo Tolstoy
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“We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.” -Harry S. Truman
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“There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.” -Alexis de Tocqueville
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“All oppression creates a state of war.” -Simone de Beauvoir
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“War should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.” -Colin Powell
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“Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ‘War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.’” -Immanuel Kant
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“Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.” -Red Auerbach
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“Let’s face it – think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the…
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“In time of war the laws are silent.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“The only defensible war is a war of defense.” -Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.” -Edmund Burke
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“War has rules, mud wrestling has rules – politics has no rules.” -Ross Perot
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“Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.” -Thomas Sowell
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“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.” -Robert Anton Wilson
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“War is never a solution it is an aggravation.” -Benjamin Disraeli
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“War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.” -George Orwell
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“What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.” -Ambrose Bierce
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“No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days – we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote.” -Hillary…
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“I find capitalism repugnant. It is filthy, it is gross, it is alienating… because it causes war, hypocrisy and competition.” -Fidel Castro
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“Love has its place, as does hate. Peace has its place, as does war. Mercy has its place, as do cruelty and revenge.” -Meir Kahane
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“Business is a combination of war and sport.” -Andre Maurois
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“Establishing lasting peace is the work of education all politics can do is keep us out of war.” -Maria Montessori
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“War is the business of barbarians.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
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“In war there is no prize for runner-up.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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“Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.” -Victor Hugo
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“Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920’s and 1930’s when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother’s keeper.” -Hubert H. Humphrey
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“Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.” -William S. Burroughs
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“Character… is a habit, the daily choice of right over wrong it is a moral quality which grows to maturity in peace and is not suddenly developed on the outbreak of war.” -Charles Wilson
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“Secret operations are essential in war upon them the army relies to make its every move.” -Sun Tzu
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“War is just when it is necessary arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.” -Niccolo Machiavelli
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“Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should have prevented it.” -Pope John Paul II
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“There’s nothing wrong with being a Conservative and coming up with a Conservative believe in foreign policy where we have a strong national defense and we don’t go to war so carelessly.” -Ron Paul
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“To establish any mode to abolish war, however advantageous it might be to Nations, would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches.” -Thomas Paine
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“We’ve used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we’re running a federal deficit that’s 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It’s more stimulative than any policy we’ve followed since World War II.” -Warren Buffett
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“I will not play tug o’ war. I’d rather play hug o’ war. Where everyone hugs instead of tugs, Where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, Where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.” -Shel Silverstein
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“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle.” -Thomas Carlyle
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“A really strong woman accepts the war she went through and is ennobled by her scars.” -Carly Simon
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“In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.” -H. L. Mencken
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“What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.” -Aldous Huxley
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“Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.” -Chuck Palahniuk
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“It’s an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That’s always been a tug of war for me.” -Jodie Foster
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“I’m not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I’m going to say I’m opposed to war. But I’m also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.” -John Wooden
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“For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.” -Ernest Hemingway
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“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” -Thomas Merton
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“Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.” -Jawaharlal Nehru
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“Americans play to win at all times. I wouldn’t give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost nor ever lose a war.” -George S. Patton
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“The United States never lost a war or won a conference.” -Will Rogers
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“Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.” -Theodore Roosevelt
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“Now, let me be clear. The path I lay out is not one paved with ever increasing government checks and cradle to grave assurance that government will always be the solution. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise the most goodies and the most benefits, I’m not your president. You have…
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“I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.” -Nelson Mandela
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“Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.” -Donald Trump
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“War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.” -Martin Luther
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“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” -Woody Allen
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“You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
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“War – An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.” -George Washington
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“Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.” -William Hazlitt
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“The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.” -George Bernard Shaw
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“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.” -Albert Camus
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“We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.” -John F. Kennedy
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“War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” -Thomas Jefferson
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“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!” -Helen Keller
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“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’ People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war… Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.” -C. S. Lewis
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“Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
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“We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.” -Ronald Reagan
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“An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.” -Madalyn Murray O’Hair
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“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.” -Winston Churchill
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“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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“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” -Albert Einstein
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“It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” -Benjamin Franklin
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“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
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“But when will our leaders learn – war is not the answer.” -Helen Thomas
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“We have been travelling through a cloud. The sky has been dark ever since the war began.” -Black Kettle
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“When the question arose whether I, as a member of the royal family, should take part in active combat in the Falklands, there was no question in her mind, and it only took her two days to sort the issue.” -Prince Andrew
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“We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.” -Anatole Broyard
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“It was definitely a part of our life. I mean, my mom had both her brothers and her fiancee in Vietnam at the same time, so it wasn’t just my dad’s story, it was my mom’s story too. And we definitely grew up listening to the stories.” -Vanessa Kerry
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“The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.” -John Randolph
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“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war love is a growing up.” -James A. Baldwin
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“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 a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.” -Abraham Lincoln
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“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
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“If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?” -Joan Baez
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“War makes thieves and peace hangs them.” -George Herbert
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“The first casualty when war comes is truth.” -Hiram Johnson
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“There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.” -Havelock Ellis
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“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” -Jeannette Rankin
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