George Santayana Quotes

Wars: You know how you start, but you never know how you end.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

When the days of rejoicing are over,/ When the flags are stowed safely away,/ They will dream of another wild 'War to End Wars'/ And another wild Armistice day.

War is about strategic agendas and epic battles that define nations and shape history. War is about courage and heroism, but it is also about pain and suffering and sorrow and tragedy

The cost of war is constantly spread before me written in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones.

War would end if the dead could return.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

War... is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror.

War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

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

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.

It's always the old to lead us to the war It's always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun Tell me is it worth it all.

I cannot consent to the bloody consequence of so silly a contest about so silly an object, conducted in the silliest manner … from which we are likely to derive nothing but poverty, disgrace, defeat, and ruin.

War: First, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.

It is a wide road that leads to the war and only a narrow path that leads home again.

You come home when the war is won.

I like war.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.