Ernest Hemingway Quotes

I'm fascinated by the First World War because it was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it was the biggest conflagration that this particular planet had seen. There was a lot of talk about utopia and how it was possible, and then, because of these events that for one reason or another couldn't be stopped, the idea of utopia went out the window.

[Describing World War I:] A short cleansing thunderstorm.

The War That Will End War.

The great wars of the 20th Century made it into the worst Century ever.

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.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

And, you see, we are living in a world in which all wars are wars of defense.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

The history of mankind is a history of war.

The history of our civilization has been one of intermittent war.

History has been the history of warfare.

The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

World history is tragic.

My home policy? I wage war. My foreign policy? I wage war. Always, everywhere, I wage war.

When the guns boom, the arts die.

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.

The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.