Consequences of War Quotes

If Roosevelt took this country into war and won, he might be one of the great figures of all time. But if we lost, he would be damned forever. The cards are now stacked against us.

Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few very far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.

Yesterday, we clinched victory in the Pacific, but we sowed the whirlwind.

Helpless, tortured, shot, blown up, my best buddies all dead, and all because we were afraid of the liberals back home, afraid to do what was necessary to save our own lives. Afraid of American civilian lawyers. I have only one piece of advice for what it's worth: If you don't want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place.

Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.

The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you've killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it's ordinary murder.

We will never know what would have happened if President Johnson had said no to more troops and more war [in Vietnam]. We do know what happened when he said yes.

A long war almost always places nations in this sad alternative: that their defeat delivers them to destruction and their triumph to despotism.

For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

A great many of the epic fantasies, from The Lord of the Rings onward, are about war, but to my mind, a lot of it doesn't really deal honestly with the consequences of war, what war does to us, as a society, what war does to us, as individuals, and the struggle for power, in the same way, and what we're fighting for.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

If Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush had ever been in combat themselves, they might not have sent troops to Iraq.

When you use force, people get hurt, and when you kill people, their relatives don't like it. And usually war has some unanticipated consequences so it's something you shouldn't launch into, on the expectation that this is going to rally the nation. This is not like 'Friday Night Lights'.

The Administration has made critical mistakes and errors in judgment leading up to the war in Iraq. The President refuses to acknowledge these mistakes, and thus, no corrective action has been taken to prevent these problems from happening again.

Only one thing can conquer war - that attitude of mind which can see nothing in war but destruction and annihilation.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

History will show that perhaps we did not think through the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. But here we are.