A siege is an act of war.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China – the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

War is the province of danger.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.

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.

War is never a lasting solution for any problem.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

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.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

The only excuse for war is that we may live in peace unharmed.

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.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

I can tell you this: If I’m ever in a position to call the shots, I’m not going to rush to send somebody else’s kids into a war.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

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.

The argument that resistance to the war should remain strictly nonviolent seems to me overwhelming.

In modern war… you will die like a dog for no good reason.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate… we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT’s Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.

The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars – yes, an end to this brutal, inhuman and thoroughly impractical method of settling the differences between governments.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

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.‘

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.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories – not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it.

War should only be declared by the authority of the people, whose toils and treasures are to support its burdens, instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.

The Iranians have shot down drones. They tried to destroy the Saudi oil fields. They tried to storm our embassy. So, when my Democratic friends say we need appeasement, well appeasement hasn’t worked. And I think that we’ve learned, with respect to Iran, that weakness invites the wolves.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.