Suzanne Collins Quotes

If I took the 40 years of my dad talking to me about war and battles and taking me to battlefields and distilled it down into one question, it would probably be the idea of the necessary or unnecessary war.

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

The object of war is victory; that of victory is conquest; and that of conquest preservation.

We are at war, and our security as a nation depends on winning that war.

We all know that in war the political and military factors have to complement each other.

Europe cannot survive another world war.

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.

Our country has never started a war. Our sole objective is deterrence, the strength and capability it takes to prevent war.

Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking... Never before was it possible for one nation to make war on another without sending armies across borders. Now with rockets and atomic bombs no center of population on the earth's surface is secure from surprise destruction in a single attack.... We cannot leave it to generals, senators, and diplomats to work out a solution over a period of generations… There is no defense in science against the weapon which can destroy civilization. Our defense is not in armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order… Future thinking must prevent wars.

Globalization has raised the strategic cost of indifference to local conflict …. Today we can choose not to act, but we can no longer choose not to know.

No one starts a war—or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so—without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war, and how he intends to conduct it.

We have won an armistice on a single battleground, not peace in the world. We may not now relax our guard nor cease our quest.

The war power of the national government is not only the power to fight, but the power to wage war successfully

Every aspect of war is political.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

Military action without political context is ineffective.

I was a history major at Princeton University; I took exams in war and diplomacy, and I find those things very fascinating.

If you sit down with British officers or British senior NCOs, they understand the sweep of history. They know the history of British forces not just in Afghanistan but the history of British successful counter-insurgencies - Northern Ireland, Malaysia.

Wars are seldom won as quickly as everyone expects, and almost always create far more problems than they solve

How is it that nations composed of people who don't want war are continually fighting?" The answer is that the opinion against war has been without adequate institutions to give it effect. War is an international affair; and to prevent it there must be international opinion, and international action upon that opinion, and international institutions to give effect to that opinion.

Let us face squarely the paradox that the world which goes to war is a world, usually, genuinely desiring peace.

War is not merely a state of things under which ordinary principles of government and normal peaceful intercourse between peoples come to an end. It is a state of things created by the importation into national and international life of new factors altogether.

Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than it is to begin them