Aphorisms Galore!

War and Peace

74 aphorisms  ·  one comment

Aphorisms in This Category

tiny.ag/phdwhmxt  ·  submitted 1997

I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war.

Cicero, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/owyunzte  ·  submitted 1997

When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.

Winston Churchill, (on formal declarations of war), in War and Peace

tiny.ag/pfpxawj8  ·  submitted 1997

To jaw-jaw is better than to war-war.

Winston Churchill, (on Korean War negotiations), in War and Peace

tiny.ag/dgf0pdxo  ·  submitted 1997

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Winston Churchill, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/ymliwjpf  ·  submitted 1997

War is not nice.

Barbara Bush, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/ircejxuc  ·  submitted 1997

You can get more of what you want with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.

Al Capone, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/ifl4hquq  ·  submitted 1997

Isn't the best defense always a good attack?

Ovid, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/ucs9vnd3  ·  submitted 1997

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

John Stuart Mill, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/jaishdmt  ·  submitted 1997

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.

Charles Edward Montague, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/9pd1qmsc  ·  submitted 1999

One moment on the battlefield is worth a thousand years of peace.

Benito Mussolini, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/db2sazsg  ·  submitted 1997

Today the real test of power is not the capacity to make war but the capacity to prevent it.

Anne O'Hare McCormick, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/8bpf0foj  ·  submitted 1997

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.

Robert J. Oppenheimer, (quoting the Bhagavadgita after witnessing the first nuclear explosion), in War and Peace

tiny.ag/5i2ylath  ·  submitted 1997

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

Groucho Marx, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/l9ib3pad  ·  submitted 1997

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Groucho Marx, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/4kgkvwyo  ·  submitted 1997

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.

Steve Martin, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/r3davdhl  ·  submitted 1997

In war, there is no substitute for victory.

Douglas MacArthur, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/aolzpl1x  ·  submitted 1997

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

Henry Kissinger, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/2cctxyhg  ·  submitted 1997

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, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/tldrjftc  ·  submitted 1997

The Devil's Dictionary (paperback)

Riot: A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in War and Peace

tiny.ag/fiog0z7u  ·  submitted 1997

The Devil's Dictionary (paperback)

Alliance: In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted into each others' pockets that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, in Law and Politics and War and Peace