War Definition Quotes

War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?

… it was not necessary to make any definition of "aggressor" or "self-defense." I do not think it can be done, anyway, accurately. They have been trying to do it in Europe for six or eight years, and they never have been able to accurately define " aggressor " or " self-defense.

War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent – war being defined as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

They [politicians] have defined the war simply in terms of the detonation of explosives. When you look at the broader picture, America is mired in two wars that we're losing at the moment. We have a political environment that is as poisonous as anything I've seen, at least since the end of Vietnam.

You can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper or a war against paranoids.

A phrase often used is that "war is war", but when one comes to ask about it, one is told that no war is going on, that it is not war. When is a war not a war? When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

As one Israeli said, "It's a big mistake for Israel to say it 'won' the war, when there was no war. There were no battles...no military enemy in the field."

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a 'war on terrorism'. You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a 'real' war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other's heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?