War Cycle Quotes

Hate begets hate, violence engenders violence, hypocrisy is answered by hypocrisy, war generates war, and love creates love.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

When war is waged, it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.

Right now, the choice isn't between war and peace. It is between war and endless war.

War nourishes war.

Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.

Each time a foe is defeated in one corner of the world, another appears elsewhere.

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.

Every war carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.

... [I]n any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until some day inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.

War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people. That is almost invariably the case.