Henry Adams Quotes

There are consequences if you act militarily, and there's big consequences if you don't act.

I wouldn't go to war over Ukraine.

We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace?

Those who make war against the United States have chosen their own destruction.

War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.

If we had not driven them into hell... hell would have swallowed us.

War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not--I am not dreaming--it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.

The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame and will get war.

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

War is never a solution; it is an aggravation.

Every diplomatic breakthrough is preceded by a crisis, but not every crisis leads to a breakthrough.

We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead.... We must elect World Peace or World Destruction.

I could have been very popular if I had launched a military attack on Iran but I chose patience.

The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding there is some day to be an awful cataclysm.

There is not a conceivable enemy unless we create it, not a nation that would fight us if it could.

Would it not be worthwhile to pause a moment before we commit ourselves to war at the pleasure of other nations in whose councils we shall have but one vote?

Be very careful of military action. You will be judged by how it ends—not by how it begins.

I am too realistic to believe in pacifism. But, nevertheless, the use of force should always be the last resort.

Are we going to start a war, the end of which we cannot see?

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonour. They chose dishonour. They will have war.