Quotes about War Objective

Douglas MacArthur

War’s very object is victory—not prolonged indecision.

Sun Tzu

The true objective of war is peace.

William Tecumseh Sherman

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Wars are fought to gain a certain objective. War itself is not the objective; victory is not the objective; you fight to remove the obstruction that comes in the way of your objective. If you let victory become the end in itself then you've gone astray and forgotten what you were originally fighting about.

George S. Patton

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

Robert A. Heinlein

War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing... but controlled and purposeful violence.

Charles McCarry

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

Carl von Clausewitz

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

Winston Churchill

You must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest.

Glenn Greenwald

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

War should be undertaken in such a way as to show that its only object is peace.

Barry Goldwater

The president refuses to say… refuses to say that the objective over there is victory.

War and international conflict had become very complicated in modern times. Americans and most other people associated victory in war with unconditional surrender. However, since the unconditional surrender is of WWII, no conflict has ended with an unconditional surrender.

Abraham Lincoln

We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.

Simon Bolivar

As this war has for its first and chief aim to destroy in Venezuela the accursed race of European Spaniards, they must be debarred from joining the revolutionary forces, however patriotic and sound they may seem, since not a single one must remain alive.

This quote comes as a shock to many for whom Bolivar was one of the great humanists and statesmen of Latin America. In the struggle to gain independence from Spain and their Spanish Colonial masters, there was an occasional Spaniard who sympathized with revolutionaries and would offer to enlist in the revolutionaries’ cause. But Bolivar at this point in time did not want the complicate the cause of his coalition whose only commonality was their hatred the Spaniards from Europe. The Spaniards in Latin America were about the most viscous and cruel occupiers in history.

Woodrow Wilson

This was not after all a conventional war, a struggle between equally predacious powers; it was a war to end all wars.

War Objective Quotes