Famous Quotes & Sayings

Harry S Truman

There is some risk involved in action, there always is. But there is far more risk in failure to act.

Harry S Truman

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

Harry S Truman

We must face the fact that peace must be built on power, as well as upon good will and good deeds.

Harold E. Varmus

Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.

J. Maarten Troost

It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.

J. Michael Straczynski

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind...

J. Michael Straczynski

If sacred places are spared the ravages of war... then make all places sacred. And if the holy people are to be kept harmless from war... then make all people holy.

J. K. Rowling

All's fair in love and war," said Ron brightly, "and this is a bit of both.

J. K. Rowling

No, it was honest," said Harry. "One of the only honest things you've said to me. You don't care whether I live or die, but you do care that I help you convince everyone you're winning the war against Voldemort.

H. G. Wells

You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

H. G. Wells

This little upset across the water doesn't mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.

H. G. Wells

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

H. G. Wells

We must end war before war ends us.

H. G. Wells

The War That Will End War.

H. G. Wells

You have only to play at Little Wars three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War must be. Great War is at present, I am convinced, not only the most expensive game in the universe, but it is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but-the available heads we have for it, are too small. That, I think, is the most pacific realization conceivable, and Little War brings you to it as nothing else but Great War can do.

H. G. Wells

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

H. G. Wells

Armament should be an illegality everywhere, and some sort of international force should patrol a treaty-bound world. Partial armament is one of those absurdities dear to moderate-minded 'reasonable' men. Armament itself is making war. Making a gun, pointing a gun, and firing it are all acts of the same order. It should be illegal to construct anywhere upon earth any mechanism for the specific purpose of killing men. When you see a gun it is reasonable to ask: 'Whom is that intended to kill?'

H. L. Mencken

Whatever the label on the parties, or the war cries issuing from the demagogues who lead them, the practical choice is between the plutocracy on the one side and a rabble of preposterous impossibilists on the other.

H. L. Mencken

This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.

H. L. Mencken

The war on privilege will never end. Its next great campaign will be against the privileges of the underprivileged.

H. L. Mencken

Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel.

H. L. Mencken

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits

H. L. Mencken

To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason

H. L. Mencken

The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.

H. L. Mencken

What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

H. L. Mencken

Nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a Russian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds of a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war.

H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.

H. L. Mencken

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

H. L. Mencken

When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

H. L. Mencken

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

H. L. Mencken

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Guglielmo Marconi

The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.

Guillermo del Toro

There are men who bloom in chaos. You call them heroes or villains, depending on which side wins the war, but until the battle call they are but normal men who long for action, who lust for the opportunity to throw off the routine of their normal lives like a cocoon and come into their own. They sense a destiny larger than themselves, but only when structures collapse around them do these men become warriors.