War Motivation Quotes

Conscription would amount to the sacrifice of nine-tenths of our moral case in this war. It would not only amount to an admission—wholly unjustified—that the heart of the country is not in the war…. It will change the basis of our participation. It will no longer be the war of the British people; it will be the war of the British governing classes.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

If we look at the representatives of two superpowers - America and Britain - and look at their conduct and their language, we would notice that they are more motivated by war than their responsibility for peace.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

There's just no question that the United States was trying desperately to prevent the independence of South Vietnam and to prevent a political settlement inside South Vietnam. And in fact it went to war precisely to prevent that. It finally bombed the North in 1965 with the purpose of trying to get the North to use its influence to call off the insurgency in the South.

They have not the heart for this battle. So think of your families, think of your homes, and remember it is they you are fighting for.

It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it;

Wars are started by old rich people. Young people want to party.

The USA is a threat to world peace. Who are they to pretend that they are the policemen of the world, the ones that should decide for the people of Iraq what should be done with their government and their leadership. All that [the USA] wants is Iraqi oil. [Blair is] simply the foreign minister of the United States. He is no longer prime minister of Britain.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

No one ever mentioned it, but thousands of men welcomed World War II as a way to escape their humdrum lives rather than a chance to fight for God and country.

A brave nation fights because it must; a cowardly nation fights because it can.

I wanted to join the Army, but my eyesight wasn't good, so I quit school and my job to just focus on fighting. I didn't want to just get deployed. I wanted to get in on the action.

It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight.

I fear that our true motivation is about oil and our own flailing economy; about the failure to destroy Al Qaeda and about revenge.

Is war perhaps nothing else but a need to face death, to conquer and master it, to come out of it alive -- a peculiar form of denial of our mortality?

You really can’t blame the military for wanting to go to war [in Iraq]. They’ve got all these new toys and they want to know whether they work or not.

In World War Two, in the OSS, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the goddamn Nazis. In the Cold War, we knew what our motivation was: to beat the Goddamn Russians. Suddenly the Cold War is over, and what is the motivation? What would compel someone to spend their lives doing this kind of thing?

In the various states of society, armies are recruited from very different motives. Barbarians are urged by the love of war; the citizens of a free republic may be prompted by a principle of duty; the subjects, or at least the nobles, of a monarchy, are animated by a sentiment of honor; but the timid and luxurious inhabitants of a declining empire must be allured into the service by the hopes of profit, or compelled by the dread of punishment.

Asked why they wanted to fight, the young women said they enjoyed it, just as some men and boys do.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

Oh you tell me that there's danger to the land you call your own, And you watch them build the war machine right beside your home, And you tell me that you're ready to go marchin' to the war, I know you're set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?

This fear factor, this war driver is a very strong one and it's been with the species ever since the beginning and it motivated the Great Wall of China. War can be aggressive or defensive, right? So it motivated the Great Wall of China. Our space program was reactive to Russia.

Libya is a war of the womb. A product of the romantic minds of women who fantasize about an Arab awakening. It is estrogen-driven paternalism on steroids.

I obviously did not volunteer to go to Afghanistan solely to protect the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.