“History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.”
— Ronald Reagan Primary source“We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, eighteen miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness through the Narrow Straits, bearing with them into the broad waters of the North the safeguard of considerable affairs […] The king’s ships were at sea.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
— Thucydides Primary source“The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [Sparta], made war inevitable.”
— Thucydides Primary source“Clausewitz’s first principle was to have a secure base. From there one proceeds to freedom of action.”
— Ian Fleming Primary source“Confident and unafraid, we labor on—not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“The main military purpose and scheme of the Dictators is to produce quick results, to avoid a prolonged war. A prolonged war never suits dictators.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“A war postponed may be a war averted.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
— Abraham Lincoln Primary source“It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of this war is that way.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Of course, when you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“The first rule of war is to concentrate superior strength for decisive action and to avoid division of force or engaging in detail.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Goodwill.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“I am sure it would be sensible to restrict as much as possible the work of these gentlemen [psychologists and psychiatrists], who are capable of doing an immense amount of harm with what may very easily degenerate into charlatanry.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Many things were adopted in the war which we were told were technically impossible, but patience, perseverance, and, above all, the spur of necessity under war conditions, made men’s brains act with greater vigour, and science responded to the demands.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ‘rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation’—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“He killed more people than the cholera”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it’s not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“I have adhered to my rule of never criticizing any measure of war or policy after the event unless I had before expressed publicly or formally my opinion or warning about it.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“The 1930’s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to war.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“And we in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the premeditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“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 Churchill Primary source“Our first line of defence is the enemy’s port.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“But I must drop one word of caution; for, next to cowardice and treachery, overconfidence, leading to neglect or slothfulness, is the worst of martial crimes.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.”
— Winston Churchill Primary source“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
— Abraham Lincoln Primary source“Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some, combination of the two.”
— Arnold J. Toynbee Primary source“There is nothing in war, which I cannot do by my own hands. If there is nobody to make gunpowder, I can manufacture it. The guncarriages I know how to construct. If it is necessary to make cannons at the forge, I can make them. The details of working them in battle, if it is necessary to teach, I shall teach them. In administration, it is I alone who have arranged the finances, as you know.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“We are warlike, because self-control contains honour as a chief constituent, and honour bravery.”
— Thucydides Primary source“War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.”
— Thucydides Primary source“Nothing augments a battalion like success.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“Coolness is the greatest quality in a man destined to command.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
— Henry David Thoreau Primary source“War is a lottery in which nations ought to risk nothing but small amounts.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“The secret of great battles consists in knowing how to deploy and concentrate at the right time.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed“The keys of a fortress are worth the liberty of its garrison when it has resolved not to surrender itself. Thus it is always more advantageous to grant honorable terms of capitulation to a garrison which has shown a vigorous resistance, than to risk the chances of an assault.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte DisputedPeace History Patriotism Napoleon Killing