War Quotes — page 27

The White Australia is yours. You may do with it what you please; but, at any rate, the soldiers have achieved the victory, and my colleague and I have brought that great principle back to you from the Conference. Here it is, at least as …

God needeth not the help of a material sword of steel to assist the sword of the Spirit in the affairs of conscience.

The horrors of war that stir the thinking world have been least noticed by the historians. The violation of women, and even children, is hardly included in the term “atrocity.” Yet so abhorrent are these things that the brutality of war …

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours! We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum. No soldier's paid to kick against His powers. We laughed, — knowing that better men would come, And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags He wars on …

It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the duke of Tintagil.

If we listen to the ideas of peace in the present moment (even supposing it were offered), it can be only because we confess ourselves unable to carry on the war. Such a confession affords but a bad security against the events which must …

It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all.

nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it

The hardest part of the battle is yet to come; the battle with ourselves, with our inherited instincts, with our cultivated taste for leisure, with our wrong early training, with our present physical unfitness… God meant the whole rich …

First let us rid our minds of the fallacy that guerrilla war is a wholly distinct thing in kind from regular war. It is nothing of the sort. War is a science whose fundamental principles are constant however wide or numerous the …

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

As even the man who would fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with workmen who organize for a strike. These combinations are, therefore, …

The transfer of the allegiance and citizenship, of no small part of the heart and life, of human beings from one sovereignty to another, without any reference to their own consent, has been a great reproach to some former transactions in …

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

It was the wise all-seeing soul Who counselled neither war nor peace: 'Only be thou thyself that goal In which the wars of time shall cease.'

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

I should unconditionally refuse every direct or indirect war service and try to induce my friends to adopt the same attitude, irrespective of the general opinion of the causes of war.

Alas! alas! who's injured by my love? What merchant's ships have my sighs drown'd? Who says my tears have overflow'd his ground? When did my colds a forward spring remove? When did the heats which my veins fill Add one more to the plaguy …

The sword sung on the barren heath, The sickle in the fruitful field; The sword he sung a song of death, But could not make the sickle yield.

Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

[T]hey who complain, in peace, of the insolence of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.

I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor. But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, …

I am opposed to war; but war can only be avoided by exerting to the utmost the defensive forces of the State.