War Leaders Quotes

Surely it's no coincidence that the Era of the AUMF, the Era of Endless War, is also the Golden Era of the Chickenhawk. We keep electing leaders who, on the most basic experiential level, literally have no idea what they're doing.

Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld; they are the funny trio.

War never accomplishes anything. It's never going to look good in the history books. People are never going to look back and think, 'He started a lot of wars; what a great leader he was!' That's not the way it works. God knows how many more of these things we're going to need before it starts to sink in.

Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.

HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

It is important to understand how leaders have adapted and thought about war and warfare across their careers. 'The Autobiography of General Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs of the Civil War' is perhaps the best war memoir ever written.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.