Jean Giraudoux Quotes

Under no stretch of imagination can war be regarded as an ethical process; yet war, force, terror, and propaganda were the evolutionary means employed to weld the German people into a tribal whole.

Any great war must be a popular movement.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

Only in a popular war against France... do I see a misfortune.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

For all we have and are, For all our children’s fate, Stand up and take the war. The Hun is at the gate!

I can hardly repress our press and our people too. They are thirsting for war against England.

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

The Yanks are coming And we won’t come back till it’s over Over there!

There is no passion to which the rulers of a people can address themselves with greater [political] effect [than war.]

With the situation now, people might be intrigued to see how a country coped with war all those years ago.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.

Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.

In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace, and the people whom they represent, with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs, urging them forward to war.

I don't like war. I particularly don't like the celebration of war, which I think the administration is a little bit guilty of.

During times of war, hatred becomes quite respectable even though it has to masquerade often under the guise of patriotism.

Patriotism is an instant reaction that fades away when the war starts.

We are a nation at war - and we should act like it.

The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.

War is being declared tomorrow here so perhaps you can understand that I have been working under difficulties, but difficulties negligible compared with what others have to go through.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

Avenge Pearl Harbor! : Join the navy now!

War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against each other.