Just War Quotes

There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics. ~ Piers Morgan

Wars results in immediate deaths and destruction, but the environmental consequences can last hundreds, often thousands of years. And it is not just war itself that undermines our life support system, but also the research and development, military exercises and general preparations for battle that are carried out on a daily basis in most parts of the world. The majority of this pre-war activity takes place without the benefit of civilian scrutiny and therefore we are unaware of some of what is being done to our environment in the name of 'security. ~ Rosalie Bertell

One makes war to win, not because it's just. ~ Michel Foucault

The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility. ~ John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher

The Qur'an had begun to develop a primitive just war theory. In the steppes, aggressive warfare was praiseworthy; but in the Qur'an, self-defense was the only possible justification for hostilities and the preemptive strike was condemned.5 War was always a terrible evil, but it was sometimes necessary in order to preserve decent values, such as freedom of worship. Even here, the Qur'an did not abandon its pluralism: synagogues and churches as well as mosques should be protected. The Muslims felt that they had suffered a fearful assault; their expulsion from Mecca was an act that had no justification. Exile from the tribe violated the deepest sanction of Arabia; it had attacked the core of the Muslims' identity. ~ Karen Armstrong

Some in my party threaten to send a message that they don't know a just war when they see it, and more broadly that they're not prepared to use our military strength to protect our security and the cause of freedom. ~ Joe Lieberman

It may be true that every necessary war must also really be a just war; but it does not absolutely follow that every just war is a necessary war. ~ John Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Marquess Of Aberdeen And Temair

Bush spoke of another principle, that a just war must "support a just cause." In the Persian Gulf, he said, "our cause could not be more noble." What nation has ever said its war was not noble? ~ Colman McCarthy

This was not a just war after all - it was just a war: yet another exercise in consecrated barbarity and sanctified slaughter. ~ James K. Morrow

We have to accept that any action we take might promote an equal and opposite reaction that we do not want. We have to realize that even the most noble actions or most obviously correct course can have its dark side that we cannot control or reason our way out of. The fighter of the "just war" must understand that her actions will result in the deaths of other humans; many of whom may be innocent. The pacifist who refuses all war must realize that his inaction might likewise result in the deaths of the innocent. There are no actions without contradiction
and yet we must act, for not to act is also a contradictory action with both positive and negative effects. ~ John Hunter

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. ~ Robert Wilson Lynd

Because of my own family's service (in the U.S. Army, Navy, and Massachusetts and New York National Guard), I am a strong supporter of the military and do believe that there are just wars. ~ Camille Paglia

The term 'just war' is an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny and oppression without killing huge numbers of people. ~ Howard Zinn

Widespread criticisms of jihad in Islam and the so-called sword verses in the Quran have unearthed for fair-minded Christians difficult questions about Christianity's own traditions of holy war and 'texts of terror.' Like Hinduism's Mahabharata epic, the Bible devotes entire books to war and rumors thereof. Unlike the Quran, however, it contains hardly any rules for how to conduct a just war. ~ Stephen R. Prothero

If America were in a just war I'd volunteer for the front line. I'd do the shuffling and win the war. ~ Muhammad Ali

I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort. ~ Cornel West

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions. ~ A.J.P. Taylor

Just war theory has been converted into a form of apologetics for whatever atrocities your favored state is carrying out. ~ Noam Chomsky

The separation between the cyber and the physical worlds was disappearing. Cyberbullying was just bullying, and cyberwar was just war - the true age of cyber began when we started removing it as a descriptor. ~ Matthew Mather

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience. ~ Alexander Cockburn

I personally am not a total pacifist. I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. I believe, for instance, the effort to destroy the Nazi regime militarily was justified military action. ~ Marianne Williamson

A "just war" - if there could be such a thing - would not require conscription. Volunteers would be plentiful. ~ Ben Salmon

The starkest reality of war is that the enemy is never really a monster, never inhuman ... Every soldier is the same fallible breed of human that we are. The making of war, even the most necessary and 'just' war, hardens human hearts. ~ Stan Goff

The First World War may have been a uniquely horrific war, but it was also plainly a just war. ~ Michael Gove

The entire hospital seemed to go still, watching and waiting, and what the hell was up with Sin and guys on horses anyway? "Well, who is he?"
"War."
Con stared at her. "War. Just ... War. What kind of name is that?" Nope, not jealous at all of muscle-bound handsome guy.
"Yeah, you know, the original War. Second Horseman of the Apocalypse?"
Con nearly swallowed his fucking tongue. Everyone else in the ER scrambled backward. Even Eidolon backed up a step as the guy swung down from the horse. Christ, standing, the guy was damned near seven feet tall.
"Sin," he said in an impossibly deep voice. He approached her, bent to kiss her cheek, and Con bristled.
"Big horse," Con ground out. "Compensating much? ~ Larissa Ione

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

On the ethics of war the Quran and the New Testament are worlds apart. Whereas Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek, the Quran tells us, 'Whoso commits aggression against you, do you commit aggression against him' (2:194). The New Testament says nothing about how to wage war. The Quran, by contrast, is filled with just-war precepts. Here war is allowed in self-defense (2:190; 22:39), but hell is the punishment for killing other Muslims (4:93), and the execution of prisoners of war is explicitly condemned (47:4). Whether in the abstract is is better to rely on a scripture that regulates war or a scripture that hopes war away is an open question, but no Muslim-majority country has yet dropped an atomic bomb in war. ~ Stephen R. Prothero

Africa the continent is not just what we see on the news. It's ... not AIDS, and it's not just war and poverty. It's so much more. It's an abundant continent, and Botswana is an abundant place. ~ Jill Scott

A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

No more wars, no more bloodshed. Peace unto you. Shalom, salaam, forever. ~ Menachem Begin

The moral equation strongly tells everyone who understands freedom, who understands morality, that Israel is engaging in a just war in defense of its people and its freedom. ~ George Pataki

Ares (The God of War) hates those who hesitate. ~ Euripides

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. ~ Arthur Wellesley

Thomas Aquinas put forward the basis of modern just war theory, suggesting that war cannot be fought for personal gain and must be waged by a legitimate body, and that the overriding motive must be to secure peace. ~ DK Publishing

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. ~ Thomas Mann

Those of us who would follow Jesus are precluded from drawing the sword. We are people who love our enemies; who prefer to undergo violence rather than inflict it upon others; who reject every form of violence, from nuclear weapons to chemical weapons to Trident submarines to handguns. (...) We renounce war and violent self-defense, tear up the just-war theory, and embrace gospel nonviolence. We not only put back any swords we have, but we beat them into plowshares. The unarmed Christ disarms us. Christ's community, the Church, is a community of nonviolence. ~ John Dear

...back to the USA where there is honor and integrity and Lord knows what else, I thought. I got confused. President Bush and Clarence Thomas and antiabortion and AIDS and Duke and crack and homelessness. And everywhere, MTV, cartoons ads, magazines--just war and sexism and violence. In Mexico, at least a can of cement falls off a scaffold on your head, no Uzis or anything personal. ~ Lucia Berlin

How could there ever be a real moral reason for war?' Harper would ask rhetorically. 'It always comes down to someone's greed. History is populated by the distorted tyrants and corrupt businessmen willing to trade a cup full of blood for a purse filled with gold. ~ Brandt Legg

All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just. ~ Mao Zedong

I am asked if I think the war was a just war ... how can I answer? I was a boy born and raised in beautiful Leningrad, a boy who loved his parents and went obediently to school. A boy who was yanked out of that life and dumped in a strange land where life followed different rules. ~ Vladislav Tamarov

I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought
in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and
body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened,
though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest,
low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Our brave men and women have made many sacrifices in just wars to defeat the forces of evil. We have exported our greatest values: freedom and opportunity, which have lifted millions out of poverty. At home, these values allow Americans to use their God-given potential and make their dreams reality. ~ Marco Rubio

We're trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks. And it's the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn't just inevitable to have violence. Not just war - all forms of violence. ~ John Lennon

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

For many people, that war [WWII] is called the "good war" because it was fought against a regime guilty of unspeakable atrocities. But the Allies did not enter the war to save Jews from extermination. The United States entered the war after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor and, as a nation, we certainly did not do as much as we should have to save the Jewish population of Europe. The basic question is still with us: Is it right, justifiable, to intervene in a nation's internal activities when those activities include genocide, ethnic cleansing, or some other demonstrable harm to a subset of its people? ~ Nel Noddings

Is it morally acceptable to murder one hundred innocent people in the process of catching a serial killer who has murdered ten people? If you think World War II was justified, your answer should be yes. ~ Michel Templet

Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war. ~ Smedley Butler

If anarchy is chaos, and chaos is war, why wasn't a single war started by anarchists? ~ Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

Gaining time is gaining everything in love, trade and war. ~ John Shebbeare

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions. ~ George Will

Everyday somebody dies... in combat, in war in battle... in game everwhere... so far nowhere is safety as you think.... I can tell you fom here what you think is wrong.... (What can you do about that??) ~ Deyth Banger

The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end. ~ T. S. Eliot

People talk about games and loneliness - it's a lonely activity. I didn't understand that. 'Gears of War' was the first multiplayer game for me that I enjoyed. But I wasn't sad. I liked being alone. I liked playing games by myself. I had lots of companionship at the house. ~ Tim Schafer

[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar
the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. The significance of this babble seemed to escape the tired company, but to me it suggested a sudden and radical change in the situation. Important enough to risk being shot at by showing myself in the doorway. Nothing happened, so I stepped into the street, ... ~ Mark Zuehlke

Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We've blunted the Taliban's momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead. ~ Barack Obama

I got into the genesis of Star Wars, and the tale seemed to me endlessly fascinating. ~ Cass Sunstein

And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonnet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation ... ~ Abraham Lincoln

War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war. ~ Robert Aumann

The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty when victorious and peaceable. ~ Maximilien Robespierre

Joy is the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved. ~ Henri Nouwen

In the event of war, I'm a hostage. ~ Woody Allen

Millions who could not follow closely or accurately the main events of the War looked day after day in the papers for the fortunes of Mafeking, and when finally the news of its relief was flashed throughout the world, the streets of London became impassable, and the floods of sterling, cockney patriotism were released in such a deluge of unbridled, delirious joy as was never witnessed again till Armistace Night, 1918 ... ~ Winston Churchill

I feel worse than I have ever done before, because now I know that it is easier to take a country into war than to bring it to live at peace, and a country at war is a bitter place to live, a risky place to have daughters, and a dangerous place to hope for a son. ~ Philippa Gregory

Dear friend, never do you go to war,
So neither rush into strong wind nor
Entirely put a trust in a distant event.

(Two-pointed thorn) ~ Siwakarn Patoommasoot

Throughout history, the word "war" has meant one thing to human beings: loss of life. The word "peace" has always meant security and love within a person's soul. ~ A.H. Metwally

Their military training will ensure success in war, but they must maintain unity by not allowing the state to grow to large, and by ensuring that the measures for promotion and demotion from one class to another are carried out. Above all they must maintain the educational system unchanged; for on education everything else depends, and it is an illusion to imagine that mere legislation without it can effect anything of consequence. ~ Plato

Place yourself ... You are either a.) part of the problem; b.) part of the solution, or c.) part of the landscape. ~ James D. Sass

So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war. ~ Paul Fussell

Talks since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 when the Republic of China government ~ Anonymous

Louisa went about her duties at the hospital, trying not to dwell on the fact that this might be her last day alive. ~ David Healey

I sat on cushioned otter-skin:
My word was law from Ith to Emain,
And shook at Invar Amargin
The hearts of the world-troubling seamen,
And drove tumult and war away ... ~ William Butler Yeats

The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency. ~ Gail Collins

War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end. It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence. ~ William Ellery Channing

Mr. President, the cause of this great discontent in the country, the cause of the evils which we now suffer and which we now fear, originates chiefly from questions growing out of the respective rights of the different States and the unfortunate subject of slavery ... ~ John J. Crittenden

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
[On Water] ~ Guy De Maupassant

My war - and I have yet to win a decisive battle - is with the modes of thought and conditioned feelings that prevail in psychology and therefore also in the way we think and feel about our being. Of these conditions none are more tyrannical than the convictions that clamp the mind and heart into positivistic science (geneticism and computerism), economics (bottom-line capitalism), and single-minded faith (fundamentalism). ~ James Hillman

Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win Southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche. ~ Sam Houston

I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied,
and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women.
Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections
about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the
ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and
deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great
literature and with an inspired teacher. ~ Susan Sontag

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

Life brings sorrows and joys alike. It is what a man does with them - not what they do to him - that is the true test of his mettle. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

If the military might of Germany and Japan are ultimately to be crushed, the United Nations, one and all, must definitely and urgently strive toward a total war effort. ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous "recurrence of birth" a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other p ~ Joseph Campbell

The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger. ~ Fidel Castro

Sixty years ago this week Hitler invaded Poland. This led to the creation of The History Channel. ~ Jay Leno

His subordinates remembered him as tough but fair-minded. Years later, one of them retained Hamilton as a lawyer, even though he had become a vocal political enemy. When Hamilton questioned the wisdom of this, the ex-soldier replied, "I served in your company during the war and I know you will do me justice in spite of my rudeness. ~ Ron Chernow

Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep, The living leaves recoil before our fires, Baring to us war-charred and broken branches, And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep. ~ Kathleen Raine

She dreamed of Venice. However, it wasn't a city alive with stars dripping like liquid gold into canals, or Bougainvillea spilling from flowerpots like overfilled glasses of wine. In this dream, Venice was without color. Where pastel palazzi once lined emerald lagoons, now, gray, shadowy mounds of rubble paralleled murky canals. Lovers could no longer share a kiss under the Bridge of Sighs; it had been the target of an obsessive Allied bomb in search of German troops. The only sign of life was in Piazza San Marco, where the infamous pigeons continued to feed. However, these pigeons fed not on seeds handed out by children, but on corpses rotting under the elongated shadow of the Campanile. ~ Pamela Allegretto

Shane: so is world war fifteen over out there?
claire:i think so ~ Rachel Caine

What kind of people are these with such low self-esteem that they need a war to feel better about themselves? ~ Bill Hicks