Conflict Quotation Archive

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

The argument from intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence. — Ayn Rand

In peace, labor is the progenitor of capital and its supplier. In war this is reversed. That’s why capital always prefers war over peace. — Bill Purdin

Profits are always higher in war because labor has no say. — Bill Purdin

The longer I live the uglier the war becomes. — Bill Purdin

The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on. — Joseph Heller

First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others. — Thomas a Kempis

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.” — Sir Winston Churchill

Unjust dominion cannot be eternal. — Seneca

Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defense of peace must be constructed.
— Unknown

When armies are mobilized and issues are joined, The man who is sorry over the fact will win. — Lao-tzu

Yes, there is a Plan B. Make Plan A work. — General David Petraeus, Iraq Forces Commander-in-Chief

The saddest truth about is war that for some people it is not hell, it’s fun. — Bill Purdin

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant person in argument. — William G. McAdoo

If we can connect in some tiny way with a human that doesn’t agree with us, then maybe we won’t blow up the planet. — Nancy White

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. — Will Durant

It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city, and the discords of families. — Pythagoras

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.
— Ashley Montagu

Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. — Dwight David Eisenhower

Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance. — Louis D. Brandeis

Sweet is war to those who know it not. — Pindar

War is fun. But war was hell. — Bill Purdin

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come. — Carl Sandburg

Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary. — Mahatma Gandhi

We should not march into Baghdad … to occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero … assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinable urban guerrilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into even greater instability.
George H. W. Bush, 41st U. S. President; from “A World Transformed,” 1998

As long as there are men, there will be wars. — Albert Einstein

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. — Euripides

The truth about war, and this is historically incontrovertible, is that it’s fun for some people. It’s exciting; it’s the ultimate risk-taking; and embedded in war are sanctions for behaviors that in peacetimes would be criminal. War is the release of our animal natures from the restraints of the work-a-day world back into the jungle. It reverses values that hold us together into war cries and savagery. It is the opposite of human. — Bill Purdin