Quotes about War

Three things are required for a war to be just. Indeed, the first requirement is that the ruler at whose command the war is to be waged have the lawful authority to do so. . . . Second, there needs to be a just cause to wage war, namely, that the enemy deserve to have war waged against it because of some wrong it has inflicted. . . . Third, those waging war need to have a right intention, namely, an intention to promote good and avoid evil.

He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea. Or he was hearing music… But "Lovely!" he used to cry and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down into the flames!

The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.

In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.

"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders," cried my uncle Toby—"but nothing to this."

Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.

The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

The Bible does not isolate war, as if it were something separate and unique and quite apart, as we tend to do in our thinking. It is but one of the manifestations of sin, one of the consequences of sin.

They would say well there's always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn't true in all cultures. It doesn't have to be true. And the first step is imaging.

We must therefore… hold them [the British] as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

Whensoever hostile aggressions… require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.