Harry S. Truman Quotes

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

A war is only as good as the peace that follows.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

The problems of peace are greater than the problems of war.

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

The war is won, but the peace is not.

It is always easy enough to take up arms, but very difficult to lay them down; the commencement and the termination of war are notnecessarily in the same hands; even a coward may begin, but the end comes only when the victors are willing.

They won the war but lost the peace.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

It's harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq -- all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering -- all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations.

We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace.

All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

The main problem that we have in Lebanon, and in the region, is we don't have a real peace process and I think this is the main focal problem that we have in the region.

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

Among the many defects that have been pointed out in the Federal Constitution ... is an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.... Let a Secretary of Peace be established.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

First of all, we have to say loud and clear to all those who are engaged in the fighting that attention to and respect for humanitarian needs is absolutely imperative. Anyone with any knowledge of Iraq, never mind any concern about the future, knows that the way in which the war is prosecuted has a big impact on what comes afterwards.

Mark! Where his carnage and his conquests cease, He makes a solitude and calls it-peace!

It is not a process of bargaining or give-and-take. The peace process is not about giving concessions. We will not allow any step which would hurt the memories of our martyrs.

Wars almost never end the way starters had in mind.

There have always been people during periods of history that thought that we could get along with the enemy if only we would reach out. Peace in our time is a philosophy.

I fight terrorism as if there was no peace process, and I negotiate the peace process as if there was no terrorism.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent.