Quotes to inspire and reflect

The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable.

The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.

My life is like water that has passed the mill; it turns no wheel.

[A] nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it’s going on and you’re in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.

Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren.

Every war is its own excuse. That’s why they’re all surrounded with ideals. That’s why they’re all crusades.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another’s fortunes, and cutting each other’s throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Of war men ask the outcome, not the cause.

It is the savor of bread broken with comrades that makes us accept the values of war.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

People who are vigorous and brutal often find war enjoyable, provided that it is a victorious war and that there is not too much interference with rape and plunder. This is a great help in persuading people that wars are righteous.

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart’s blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out ”loner“ who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

[W]e must love men more than things, and I admire and weep more for the soldiers than for the churches which were only the recording of an heroic gesture which today is reenacted at every moment.

The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views.

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?

Against war it may be said that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished revengeful.

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.

We kill because were afraid of our own shadow, afraid that if we used a little common sense we’d have to admit that our glorious principles were wrong.

We think—although of course, now, we very seldom / Clearly think— / That the other side of War is Peace.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.

One believes in the coming of war if one does not sufficiently abhor it.

She, Ruin, is strong and sound on her feet, and therefore / far outruns all Prayers, and wins into every country / to force men astray; and the Prayers follow as healers after her.

No man who witnessed the tragedies of the last war, no man who can imagine the'unimaginable possibilities of the next war can advocate war out of irritability or frustration or impatience.

It is easier to lead men to combat and to stir up their passions than to temper them and urge them to the patient labors of peace.

War is an unmitigated evil. But it certainly does one good thing. It drives away fear and brings bravery to the surface.

War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

Boys and girls, / And women, that would groan to see a child / Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, / The best amusement for our morning meal.

As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.

There is no working middle course in wartime.

There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.

Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.

The art of war is like the art of the courtesan— indeed, they might be called sisters, since both are the slaves of desperation.

These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

Half the agony of living is waiting.

People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.

The philosophy of waiting is sustained by all the oracles of the universe.

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Voting is simply a way of determining which side is the stronger without putting it to the test of fighting.

Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors to bullets.