War Quotes – Reflection and Insight

"Whenever a king sees that his people are about to revolt against him, he starts a war with another country."

Napoleon Bonaparte

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective. So the only way he figures that he’s going to get re-elected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran."

Donald Trump

"Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. Even the names of the four Ministries by which we are governed exhibit a sort of impudence in their deliberate reversal of the facts. The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely."

George Orwell

"Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."

Henry Kissinger

"I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race."

Winston Churchill

"If my sons did not want wars, there would be none."

Gutle Schnapper Rothschild

"Never is so much lied as before an election, during a war, and after the hunt."

Louis Berger

"Luxury destroys more efficiently than war."

Juvenal

"In war, truth is the first casualty."

Aischylos

"Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths."

Eddie Adams

"The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined. If beef is your idea of “real food for real people” you’d better live real close to a real good hospital."

Neal D. Barnard

"Every faltering regime has tried to bind its subjects by war as a last resort."

George Bernard Shaw

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

"Cognitive warfare is waged on the battlefield of the human mind. Tactical or strategic objectives are achieved by pursuing warfare by other means. This method of warfare directly exploits advances in digital technology, applied both at individual and networked levels, to manipulate the psychological, social, and information environment. This shapes not only what people think individually and as social networks but also influences how they collectively act and interact.

Launched by a sophisticated adversary, cognitive warfare manipulates individual and group representations or beliefs with the desired effect of amplifying targeted behaviors and actions that favor the adversary. Pursued to the fullest, cognitive warfare has the potential to destabilize societies, military organizations, and fracture alliances.

Cognitive warfare is achieved by integrating cyber, information, psychological, and social engineering capabilities. Exploiting information technology, it seeks to create confusion, false representations, and uncertainty with a deluge of information over-abundance or misinformation. This is achieved by focusing attention on false targets, causing distraction, introducing false narratives, radicalizing individuals, and amplifying social polarization to muster the cognitive effects needed to achieve short-term and long-term objectives."

NATO

"The reason we have troops overseas in Germany is not to protect Germans, everything we have is for our benefit."

Frederick Benjamin „Ben“ Hodges

"It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance."

Lester Neil Smith

"Take a look at Israel’s history and you would know who the terrorist is."

Al Pacino

"Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve."

Robert McNamara