Pre Civil War Quotes

1. "Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it."
Author: Alan Bennett

2. "Where execution is dominant, as it is in the individual events of a war whether great or small, then intellectual factors are reduced to a minimum."
Author: Carl Von Clausewitz

3. "Do you know the Guardians?" I asked Zay. "Is there some kind of club or yearly get-together where Guardians get drunk, wear funny hats, and compare war stories?"
Author: Devon Monk

4. "After a big war a nation doesn't want another for a generation or more."
Author: Edward Grey

5. "Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men. Therefore atheism did never perturb states; for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no further: and we see the times inclined to atheism (as the time of Augustus Cæsar) were civil times. But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government. The master of superstition is the people; and in all superstition wise men follow fools; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reversed order."
Author: Francis Bacon

6. "In her time Nor Tigelaar had faced insurrectionists and collaborationists and war profiteers. She'd endured abduction and prison and self-mutilation. She'd sold herself in sex not for cash but for military information that might come in handy to the resistance, and in so doing she'd come across a rum variety of human types."
Author: Gregory Maguire

7. "It is our job to work for the government of the day and so that means working for Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, and we need to do those preparations just to be sure that we're ready for whoever you, the British public, elect and that's core to our civil service values over the last 150 years."
Author: Gus O'Donnell

8. "The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die."
Author: Hampton Sides

9. "The bomb and the entrance of the Russians into the war will certainly have an effect on hastening the victory."
Author: Henry L. Stimson

10. "Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen, was von selber aus mir heraus wollte. Warum war das so sehr schwer?"
Author: Hermann Hesse

11. "To MankindAnd the hope that the war against follymay someday be won after all."
Author: Isaac Asimov

12. "Nothing more then nothing can be said.We make our lives by what we love.Being American, having been trained to be sentimental, I fought for noises … when the war came along, I decided to use only quiet sounds. There seemed to me to be no truth, no good, in anything big.Somebody asked Debussy how he wrote music. He said: "I take all the tones there are, leave out he one's I don't want, and use all the others". Satie said: "When I was young, people told me; you'll see when you're fifty years old. Now I'm fifty. I've seen nothing".Slowly as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere – and that is a pleasure.It is not irritating to be where one is, it is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.All I know about method is that when I'm not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I'm working, it is quit clear I know nothing."
Author: John Cage

13. "He tried not to think what he knew--that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds."
Author: John Steinbeck

14. "Ash laid his cheek against the back of my head and sighed. It wasn't a sigh of irritation or anger or the melancholy that seemed to plague him at times. He sounded...content. Peaceful, even. It made me a little sad, knowing we couldn't have more, that this could be our last night together, without war and politics and faery laws coming between us.Ash brushed the hair from my neck and leaned close to my ear, his voice so soft that not even Grimalkin could've heard it. "I love you," he murmured, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest. "Whatever happens, we're together now. Always."
Author: Julie Kagawa

15. "Vietnam...war...it did something to us. Or maybe not. Maybe the bad seeds were always in me, and war gave them a dark place in which to grow."
Author: Kristin Hannah

16. "Nobody whom this war has touched will ever be happy again in quite the same way. But it will be a better happiness, I think, little sister - a happiness we've earned."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

17. "...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right."
Author: Laura Lippman

18. "Only twenty - nine years in the entire human history had been without warfare, and now here he was too, travelling between the episodes of a rapacious civil war."
Author: Nadeem Aslam

19. "It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere."
Author: Richard Schiff

20. "For no one makes aggresive war unless he excepts to win"
Author: Robert A. Taft

21. "You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go." "The War Poems"
Author: Siegfried Sassoon

22. "[Weiss v. District Board, March 18, 1890]There is no such source and cause of strife, quarrel, fights, malignant opposition, persecution, and war, and all evil in the state, as religion. Let it once enter into our civil affairs, our government soon would be destroyed. Let it once enter our common schools, they would be destroyed. Those who made our Constitution saw this, and used the most apt and comprehensive language in it to prevent such a catastrophe."
Author: Supreme Court Of Wisconsin

23. "I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings."
Author: Walter Dean Myers

Pre Civil War Quotes Pictures