War Quotes

I am trying to marshal all the forces I can to prevent this coming war, and to strengthen Britain.

Jellicoe was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.

Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.

The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.

They have destroyed your weapons, but these weapons would in any case have become obsolete before the next war. That war will be fought with brand-new ones, and the army which is least hampered with obsolete material will have a great advantage.

There are two supreme obligations which rest upon a British government. They are of equal importance. One is to strive to prevent a war, and the other is to be ready if war should come.

War is a hard school, but the British, once compelled to go there, are attentive pupils.

A prodigious event had happened. The monotony of toil and of the daily round was suddenly broken. Everything was strange and new. War aroused the primordial instincts of races born of strife. Adventure beckoned to her children. A larger, nobler life seemed to be about to open upon the world. But it was, in fact, only Death.

The Boers were the most humane people where white men were concerned.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy.

Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever.

I proceeded to a joint review of the British and American forces. There was a long march past in threes, during which the tune "United States Marines" bit so deeply into my memory that I could not get it out of my head.

The sufferings and impoverishment of peoples might arrest their warfare, the collapse of the defeated might still the cannonade, but their hatreds continue unappeased and their quarrels are still unsettled.

Virtuous motives, trammelled by inertia and timidity, are no match for armed and resolute wickedness. A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war. The cheers of weak, well-meaning assemblies soon cease to echo, and their votes soon cease to count. Doom marches on.

So we have had to dispense with the indispensable.

It is much better to be frightened now than to be killed hereafter.

A Hun alive is a war in prospect.

As we have triumphed, so we may be merciful; as we are strong, so we can afford to be generous.

When you borrow money from another country for the sacred purpose of national rehabilitation, it is wrong to squander it upon indulgences.

To urge the preparation of defence is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war were imminent, preparations for defence would be too late.