War - christiansquoting.org.uk

Always remember to pillage before you burn.

Only God can forgive bin Laden; our mission is to arrange the meeting. - Apocryphal; seen on Usenet attributed to a Marine overheard in the Pentagon Dining Room

God blew and they were scattered. -Inscription, on the English medal for the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1588.

The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. -Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) _Crises of the Republic_ [1972], "On Violence"

Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is 30 to know more dead than living people.- Lady Cynthia Asquith, _Diaries 1915-18, 1968

You heroes, who shed your blood and lost your lives. You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country, so rest in peace. There is no difference as far as we're concerned between the Johnnies and Mehmets who lie side by side in this country of ours. You mothers, who sent your sons to a far away country, wipe the tears from your eyes for your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives in this land, they have become our sons, as well.-Ataturk at Gallipoli

If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans. -Otto von Bismarck

While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now I'll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight; while there is a drunkard left, while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight˜I'll fight to the very end! - General William Booth

We have too many men of science; too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. -General Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) _Armistice Day speech to the Boston Chamber of Commerce_ [1948]

Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.- Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, On Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, address to the nation 4 Jan 80

War is not 'the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.-G.K. Chesterton ILN, 7/24/15

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. -G.K. Chesterton ILN, 1/14/11

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.-Winston Churchill, Speech at White House, June 26, 1954 in New York Times 27 June 1954, p. 1

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. but if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour. -Excerpt of Speech given by Winston Churchill to the House of Commons as the The Battle of Britain Begins, 18 June 1940

Let us learn our lessons. Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. Antiquated War Offices, weak, incompetent or arrogant commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant fortune, ugly surprise, awful miscalculations - all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war.-
Winston Churchill - "My Early Life" (1930)-Stimson, what was gunpowder? Trivial. What was electricity? meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath." Winston Churchill, July 1945, according to Lewis L. Strauss (1962), _Men and Decisions_, p. 186

The Great War differed from all ancient wars in the immense power of the combatants and their fearful agencies of destruction, and from all modern wars in the utter ruthlessness with which it was fought. All the horrors of all the ages were brought together .... Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals often on a greater scale and of longer duration .... When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility. -- Churchill, _The World Crisis_

This is no ordinary war, but a struggle between nations for life and death. It raises passions between nations of the most terrible kind. It effaces the old landmarks and frontiers of our civilization. - Winston S Churchill, The Times, 1 November 1914

For the best part of twenty years the youth of Britain and America have been taught that war was evil, which is true, and that it would never come again, which has been proved false. For the best part of twenty years, the youth of Germany, of Japan and Italy, have been taught that aggressive war is the noblest duty of the citizen and that it should be begun as soon as the necessary weapons and organization have been made. We have performed the duties and tasks of peace. They have plotted and planned for war. This naturally has placed us, in Britain, and now places you in the United States at a disadvantage which only time, courage and untiring exertion can correct. -- Winston Churchill, Dec. 26, 1941 - speech to the United States Congress

Christians need to focus attention on the issues surrounding just war. The President must respond to the terrorist attacks forcefully and quickly. The Bible teaches that the government has the power of the sword to preserve order and do justice. At the same time, the power of the sword has to be tempered by the restraints of the just war doctrine. Beginning with St. Augustine some 1600 years ago, Christians have thought and written about the appropriate use of military force. Today we need to be the ones who insist that the response to the terrorist attacks be proportionate, that it doesn't create a greater evil, and that civilians are not targeted. I have been watching the television and I have yet to hear the question of just war raised. If we don't bring these issues into public discourse, no one will. The fact is that this country is hurting and grieving. It is perplexed, frustrated, and confused about what needs to be done next. This is the time that we can come alongside and offer compassion, mercy, understanding, and good instead of evil. And we can contribute to the public debate that will inform our nation's actions in a way that reflects God's standards of justice.- Chales Colson - "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" 17th September 2001

„It is an odd thing, Mr. Ireton, that each man wages war believing that God is on his side.YI'll warrant God should often wonder who is on his.-- Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (1599-1658), to one of his lieutenants before the 1645 Battle of Naseby, in which Cromwell‚s „New Model Army Iron Sides utterly defeated the Royalists

God made them as stubble to our swords. -- Oliver Cromwell after victory at Marston Moor, 2 July 1644

No one would be foolish enough to choose war over peace--in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons. Croesus of Lydia

Even as it reels from last week's election returns, the atheist left continues to insist that George Bush has engaged the nation in a modern crusade because of his faith in the Christian God. They believe this in part because their godless relativism somehow does not prevent them from believing that Manichean evil exists in the form of Republican politicians, and partly because they subscribe to the theory that religion is the primary cause of the wars that have plagued human history. [...] A more systematic review of the 489 wars listed in the Wikipedia's list of military conflicts, ranging from Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars to the 1969 Football War between Honduras and El Salvador, shows that only 53 of these wars &endash; 10.8 percent &endash; can reasonably be described as having a religious nature, even if one counts each of the 10 Crusades separately. If there is a god responsible for this ever-present bloodshed, it is Mars, not Jehovah or Jesus Christ. --Vox Day, God, George Bush and war

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.-Durant's Lesson's of History p 81

It is appallingly obvious our technology has exceeded our humanity. Albert Einstein

The essence of war is fire, famine, and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences.- Dwight D. Eisenhower

To live amongst men who would give their last fag, their last bit, aye, even their last breath if need be for a pal--that is comradeship, the comradeship of the trenches. The only clean thing borne of this life of cruelty and filth. It grows in purity from the very obscenity of its surroundings.
An English private quoted in John Ellis , Eye Deep In Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I

We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before...The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.
German machine gunner, the Somme, John Ellis' _Eye-deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I_

The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. David Friedman

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. Hermann Goering:

The idea that war should be conducted within a moral framework may seem like a quaint medieval practice, but as speech separates humans from the apes, so morality separates civilisation from the barbarians.-Emmanuel Goldstein

No matter how hard we try words simply cannot express the horror, the shock, and the revulsion we all feel over what took place in this nation on Tuesday morning. September 11 will go down in our history as a day to remember.--Billy Graham, Speech, "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance" (14 September 2001)

We've always needed God from the very beginning of this nation but today we need Him especially. We're facing a new kind of enemy. We're involved in a new kind of warfare and we need the help of the Spirit of God. The Bible's words are our hope... --Billy Graham, Speech, "National Day of Prayer anRemembrance" (14 September 2001)

I also visited two Casualty Clearing Stations at Montigny…The A.G. reported today that the total casualties are established at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe…--Sir Douglas Haig, diary, July 2, 1916, at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme

The three greatest scourges of the 20th century ˜ Nazism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism ˜ were defeated through war or continued military resistance. More were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao outside of combat than died in World Wars I and II. War, as Sherman said, is all hell, but as Heraclitus admitted it is also "the father of us all." Wickedness ˜ whether chattel slavery, the gas chambers, or concentration camps ˜ has rarely passed quietly into the night on its own. The present evil isn't going to, either.-- Victor David Hanson

...the most important question of the moment is not so much the practical difficulties of military action or intelligence gathering techniques, but the question of whether we are clear and confident of why we must now fight with unmitigated ferocity&emdash;with what some might even call "fanaticism." And it is just here that the split on the Left in America is most significant. The fever swamps of the multicultural Left, besotted with "post-modern" theory which rejects both the idea of reason and progress, cannot escape the "moral equivalence" between America and its terrorist enemies. Such people, as Churchill once put it in another context, are unable to choose between the fire brigade and the fire. Older liberals, who still have faith in reason and progress as it came down from the Progressive Era, recognize this for the repugnant nihilism that it is. Time magazine essayist Lance Morrow, not known for ferocious or spirited pronouncements, has it right when he wrote: "Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company." -- Steven Hayward, "A Churchillian Perspective on September 11", _On Principle_, December 2001, http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v9n5/hayward.html

No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: "Come back with your shield or on it." Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome. - Robert Heinlein

Casualties? What do I care for casualties?
Major-General A. G. Hunter-Weston, 'The Butcher of Hellas', who lost three divisions during one assault on the cliffs of Gallipoli; the landings began on 25 April 1915.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth. - Henrik Ibsen (1828 &endash; 1906)

It is unfortunate, that the efforts of mankind to recover the freedom of which they have been so long deprived, will be accompanied with violence, with errors, and even with crimes. But while we weep over the means, we must pray for the end. --Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey Presents the Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, 1940

Man's greatest joy is to slay his enemy, plunder his riches, ride his steeds, see the tears of his loved ones and embrace his women. &emdash; Genghis Khan

Outlawing all atomic weapons could be a magnificent gesture. However, it should be remembered that Gettysburg had a local ordinance forbidding the discharge of firearms. -Homer D. King

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.~Martin Luther King, Jr.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.-- Henry Kissinger, Foreign Affairs, Jan 1969

But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)...Sura 9:5 (Translation of Yusuf Ali)

Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, (which is Islam that abolishes all other religions) of the people of the Book, (meaning the Jews and the Christians) until they pay the jizya (the tax imposed upon them) with willing submission and feel themselves subdued. (with humiliation and submission to the government of Islam.)- Sura 9:29 reads: " (Commentary in parenthesis is from the Tafsir Al-Jalalein. i.e., Al-Jalalein Interpretation of the Koran.)

I will instill terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them." ( Sura 8:12 Yusuf Ali)

The peaceful two [John Lennon & Yoko] argued, reasonably enough, that if everyone stayed in bed, occupying themselves in growing their hair, there would be no wars. - Bernard Levin, 'The Pendulum Years' 1976

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.--C.S. Lewis

Dean Acheson took Oppenheimer into the Oval Office and introduced him to Truman. Oppenheimer said, 'I have blood on my hands.' Truman claims that he responded to Oppenheimer by saying, 'Never mind, it will all come out in the wash.' Then Truman cut short the interview... Acheson was called back into Truman's presence... Truman shouted 'Never bring that idiot here again.' - Leona Marhsall Libby _The Uranium People_:

Military glory--that attractive rainbow thatrises in showers of blood. --Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

I know that the LORD is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the LORD'S side. -- Lincoln, reply to a clergyman who said to Lincoln that he hoped "the Lord was on our side, Francis B. Carpenter, _Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln_, p. 282 (1867).

Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffman: True, but don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
Alan Clark "The Donkeys," about the First World War.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. Robert Lynd

When the crusades of the Middle Ages are remembered at all, it is usually with disdain and derision. In a post Enlightenment word, the concept of religious warfare is odious, largely because most people no longer believe that one's religious beliefs are relevant to one's view of the world or place in it. Instead, modern wars are fought for political and ideological causes, like democracy or nationalism - ideas that would not seem worth the shedding of one drop of blood to most medieval men and women. ....Rather than fighting for a patriotic vision of a nation state, thousands of medieval Europeans marched off to fight for Christ. If both cases, the soldiers felt similarly about their causes. They were willing to sacrifice their lives to defend what the held most sacred. Thomas F Madden, A Short History of the Crusades, p1

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponents heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him. - S.K Malik, The Quranic Concept of War, p.59. Pakistan 1979

People of Baghdad, remember for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain and her Allies for there can be neither peace nor prosperity where there is enmity or misgovernment. Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.- Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, March 11, 1917 after the deceptively easy march into Baghdad

Men are at war with one another because each man is at war with himself. --Francis J. Meehan

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice--is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the existing of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
John Stuart Mill, "The Contest in America," pp. 208-09, in John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions (Boston: William V. Spencer, 1867).

President Clinton said today the the United States owed Japan no apology for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, and that President Harry S. Truman had made the right decision to use the bombs. -- New York Times, April 8 1995.

Modern [Secular] warfare has become total, sparing almost no one and few institutions. In World War II, more civilians were killed than combatants. The saturation bombing of civilians was standard operating policy by the Germans and the Allies, culminating in the senseless bombing of Dresden in 1945, a German city with no military targets, where at least 135,000 civilians, and possibly a quarter million, perished in huge fire storms that were created when almost 2,000 bombers dropped 650,000 incendiary bombs on a defenseless city swollen with refugees from the east. Gary North, "The Demographics of Decline," Moses and Pharaoh, Institute for Christian Economics, 1985, p. 359.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil. -- George Orwell

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homocidal maniac.". - George Orwell

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. --George Orwell [Eric Blair] (1903-1950) _Polemic_ [May 1946], "Second Thoughts on James Burnham"

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen, Killed in action, Ors, 4 November 1918, One week before the armistice.

Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him? Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensees (1660)

When cruelty is inflicted on innocent people, it discredits whatever cause. Ronald Reagan

Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit softly.--Theodore Roosevelt

Weakness is provocative, - Donald Rumsfeld

There are a lot of people who say he hates our freedoms, as you said, or hates our liberties, and hates us for what we are, rather than what we do.That is a very common piece of analysis. And I think it is entirely wrong. Bin Laden has resonance in the Muslim world because he has focused his dislike for the things we do, not what we are.
It is a very clear policy. None of it has to do with ephemeral things or slogans. It has to do with very clear-cut, concrete things. And I think that is why he is so effective in the Muslim world. He has picked a numbers of items that, whether you are, however you term it a moderate, a conservative, or a liberal Muslim, there is a certain amount of sympathy for the goals bin Laden has enunciated.
Any individual who continues to tell the American people that Osama bin Laden is simply a more lethal than usual gangster, or that he only represents the lunatic fringe of the Muslim world, or that this war has nothing to do with religion, as long as they keep spouting that sort of analysis, they will be giving the American people the wrong idea
We're clearly engaged, if not in a war against Islam, in a war against a substantial number of Muslims who are mad at us for policy reasons," he continued. "It's a war that's not going to end any time soon. And we really need to at least appreciate the motivation behind it before we're going to be able to cope with it and ultimately defeat it. - CIA Bin Laden specialist Michael Scheuer, formerly, Anonymous, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror from a VOA interview http://www.voanews.com/english/2004-11-17-voa73.cfm



If we let the international police action against terrorism degenerate into a civilizational war of the West versus Islam, we are heading toward catastrophe. The last thing we need is a counter-jihad to respond to the jihad invoked against us by the pals of Bin Laden. Bin Laden has set a trap for the United States. Let us not walk into it. ~Arthur Schlesinger Jr, (Sept 23, 2001)

War's legitimate object is more perfect peace - William Tecumseh Sherman

We do not have to fear atomic bombs; but we do have to fear godless men. --Fulton John Sheen (1895-1979) _Thoughts For Daily Living_ [1955]

As we talked, I noticed a fellow mortarman sitting next to me. He held a handful of coral pebbles in his left hand. With his right hand he idly tossed them into the open skull of the Japanese machine gunner. Each time his pitch was true I heard a little splash of rainwater in the ghastly receptacle. My buddy tossed the coral chunks as casually as a boy casting pebbles into a puddle on some muddy road back home; there was nothing malicious in his action. The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief. -- E. B. Sledge, _With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa_, 1981

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism. Thomas Sowell

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church--none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. ... War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. ... In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses--but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction--and that is war. --"Father Severyan", in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's _November 1916_

One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." J.R.R. Tolkien in his Preface to the Lord of the Rings

The enemy started to advance in mass down the railway cutting, about 800 yards off, and Maurice Dease fired his two machine-guns into them and absolutely mowed them down. I should judge without exaggeration that he killed at least 500 in two minutes. The whole cutting was full of bodies and this cheered us all up. Lieutenant K. Tower, Royal Fusiliers, 1914

This government holds the view that any general bombing of an extensive area wherein there resides a large population engaged in peaceful pursuits is unwarranted and contrary to the principles of law and humanity. - U. S. government, 1937, responding to the Japanese bombing of Nanking, according to Len Giovanetti and Fred Freed (1965). _The Decision to Drop the Bomb_, p. 37.

I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. John Wayne

I always say that, next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.--Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852)

Only the winners decide what were war crimes. Gary Willis

No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.-- Woodrow Wilson, speech, 1911