World War Quotes – Reflective Statements on Historical Events

"The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?"

Eduardo Galeano

"In war, truth is the first casualty."

Aischylos

"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

"I don’t know whether Napoleon did or did not try to get across there and I don’t care. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."

Henry Ford

"The combination of the silence of the masses and the sometimes overwhelming volume of this greatest global crime of all time in my mind is, in its relentless daily presence, the most eerie and surreal feeling I have ever experienced."

Unbekannt

"Two world wars, three monstrous dictatorships-in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China-plus every lesser variant of devastating socialist experimentation in a global spread of brutality and despair, have not prompted modern intellectuals to question or revise their dogma. They still think that it is daring, idealistic and unconventional to denounce the rich. They still believe that money is the root of all evil-except government money, which is the solution to all problems."

Ayn Rand

"We all know, but still pay insufficient attention, to the frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack, which would bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyber attack."

Klaus Schwab

"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

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are."

Ayn Rand

"Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world."

Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin

"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

"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

"It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda."

Harry Edson Browne

"America rules the world - by force."

Harry Edson Browne

"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."

George Orwell

"The war that is being prepared will be a battle between international capital and the ruling dynasties. Capital wishes to have no one over it, knows no God or Lord, and wishes to have all states ruled as a great banking business. Their profit shall become the sole guide of the rulers ... Business ... one and only."

Kardinal John Murphy Farley

"The highest art of war is to avoid military engagements altogether and defeat the enemy by destroying his moral principles, his religion, his culture and his traditions. When a country has been demoralized in that way it can be taken over without a single shot being fired."

Vladimir Iljitsch Lenin