Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

War

War is science of destruction.

So ends the bloody business of the day.

A day of battle is a day of harvest for the devil.

My sentence is for open war.

Horribly stuffed with epithets of war.

The brazen throat of war.

There are few die well that die in a battle.

There never was a good war or a bad peace.

Battle’s magnificently stern array!

War cannot be put on a certain allowance.

There is war in the skies!

I hate war, for it spoils conversation.

In war the olive branch of peace is of use.

War never leaves, where it found a nation.

The fortune of war is always doubtful.

The crystal-pointed tents from hill to hill.

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.

I propose to fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer.

They shall have wars and pay for their presumption.

War is a crime which involves all other crimes.

War is the corruption and disgrace of man.

The guard dies but never surrenders.

To the victors belong the spoils of the enemy.

War disorganizes, but it is to reorganize.

The law is silent during war.

Christianity hath harmonized the conduct of war.

A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war.

The feast of vultures, and the waste of life.

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

War, war is still the cry; “War even to the knife!”

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

To murder thousands takes a specious name.

All delays are dangerous in war.

Their flag was furled, and mute their drum.

Men practice war; beasts do not.

The wounds of civil war are deepest.

A man-of-war is the best ambassador.

The worse the man, the better the soldier.

Cry “Havock,” and let slip the dogs of war.

I prefer the hardest terms of peace to the most just war.

And high above the fight the lonely bugle grieves.

We kind o’ thought Christ went agin war an’ pillage.

When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war!

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

Ingenious to their ruin, every age improves the art and instruments of rage.

The warrior who cultivates his mind polishes his arms.

’Tis a principle of war that when you can use the lightning, ’tis better than cannon.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Who asks whether the enemy were defeated by strategy or valor?

War in men’s eyes shall be a monster of iniquity in the good time coming.

Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?

Every creature lives in a state of war by nature.

A great country can have no such thing as a little war.

War requires three things,—money, money, money.

I heard the bullets whistle; and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.

War is a terrible trade; but in the cause that is righteous sweet is the smell of powder.

War and Niagara thunder to a music of their own.

Now hear the trumpets’ clangor from afar, and all the dreadful harmony of war.

Even in a righteous cause force is a fearful thing.

Grim-visag’d war hath smoothed his wrinkled front.

Most of the debts of Europe represent condensed drops of blood.

Providence for war is the best prevention of it.

War its thousands slays; peace its ten thousands.

The bodies of men, munition, and money may justly be called the sinews of war.

The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart.

Advise how war may, best upheld, move by her two main nerves, iron and gold.

If Christian nations were nations of Christians, there would be no wars.

Food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

Civil war is a momentous evil.***Civil war needs momentous and solemn justification.

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

When all is past, it is humbling to tread o’er the weltering field of the tombless dead.

The king who makes war on his enemies tenderly distresses his subjects most cruelly.

Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy—death.

Let the gulled fool the toll of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.

The fate of war is to be exalted in the morning, and low enough at night! There is but one step from triumph to ruin.

War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love; and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ.

The sight of a battlefield after the fight is enough to inspire princes with a love of peace and a horror of war.

The decision will come only from God, from the God of battles, when He lets fall from His hand the iron dice of destiny.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.

The soldier at the same time may shoot out his prayer to God, and aim his pistol at his enemy, the one better hitting the mark for the other.

Fly from wrath; sad be the sights and bitter fruits of war; a thousand furies wait on wrathful swords.

Cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them, volleyed and thundered.

The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of law.

Take my word for it, if you had seen but one day of war, you would pray to Almighty God that you might never see such a thing again.

The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill, or, in other words, in learning what we do not know from what we do.

War is a child that devours its nurses one after another, until it is claimed by its true parents.

War, when decisive, has a quick and practical philosophy of its own, and the difficulties that seem largest in its progress usually vanish at its close.

The fearful thunder-roar of red-breathed cannon and the wailing cry of myriad victims filled the air.

Let war be so carried on that no other object may seem to be sought but the acquisition of peace.

Battle, with the sword, has cut many a Gordian knot in twain which all the wit of East and West, of Northern and Border statesmen, could not untie.

Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

Even in a righteous cause force is a fearful thing; God only helps when men can help no more.

Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.

The measure of civilization in a people is to be found in its just appreciation of the wrongfulness of war.

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.

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.

A steady hand in military affairs is more requisite than in peace, because an error committed in war may prove irremediable.

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

The nations bleed where’er her steps she turns; the groan still deepens, and the combat burns.

We fight to great disadvantage when we fight with those who have nothing to lose.

No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

Woe to the man that first did teach the cursed steel to bite in his own flesh, and make way to the living spirit!

There is strength and a fierce instinct, even in common souls, to bear up manhood with a stormy joy when red swords meet in lightning.

War ’twixt you twain would be as if the world should cleave, and that slain men should solder up the rift.

He who makes war his profession cannot be otherwise than vicious. War makes thieves, and peace brings them to the gallows.

Great warriors, like great earthquakes, are principally remembered for the mischief they have done.

Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better.

If the cause and end of war be justifiable, all the means that appear necessary to the end are justifiable also.

“Go, with a song of peace,” said Fingal; “go, Ullin, to the king of swords. Tell him that we are mighty in war; that the ghosts of our foes are many.”

War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people.

A great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle (patriotism) alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.

Every war involves a greater or less relapse into barbarism. War, indeed, in its details, is the essence of inhumanity. It dehumanizes. It may save the state, but it destroys the citizen.

If war has its chivalry and its pageantry, it has also its hideousness and its demoniac woe. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek.

The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course, is to be effected by stratagem.

Laws are commanded to hold their tongues among arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold.

A wise minister would rather preserve peace than gain a victory, because he knows that even the most successful war leaves nations generally more poor, always more profligate, than it found them.

Wars, therefore, are to be undertaken for this end, that we may live in peace, without being injured; but when we obtain the victory, we must preserve those enemies who behaved without cruelty or inhumanity during the war.

Kings play at war unfairly with republics; they can only lose some earth, and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves.

A nation is not worthy to be saved if, in the hour of its fate, it will not gather up all its jewels of manhood and life, and go down into the conflict, however bloody and doubtful, resolved on measureless ruin or complete success.

War is one of the greatest plagues than can afflict humanity: it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge, in fact, is preferable to it. Famine and pestilence become as nothing in comparison with it.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility; but when the blast of war flows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger.

It is only necessary to make war with five things: with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city, and the discords of families.

What a fine-looking thing is war! Yet, dress it as we may, dress and feather it, daub it with gold, huzza it, and sing swaggering songs about it,—what is it, nine times out of ten, but murder in uniform!

That men should kill one another for want of somewhat else to do, which is the case of all volunteers in war, seems to be so horrible to humanity that there needs no divinity to control it.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

I abominate war as Unchristian. I hold it the greatest of human crimes. I deem it to involve all others,—violence, blood, rapine, fraud; everything that can deform the character, alter the nature, and debase the name of man.

Wars are to the body politic, what drams are to the individual. There are times when they may prevent a sudden death, but if frequently resorted to, or long persisted in, they heighten the energies only to hasten the dissolution.

War, like all other situations of danger and of change, calls forth the exertion of admirable intellectual qualities and great virtues, and it is only by dwelling on these, and keeping out of sight the sufferings and sorrows, and all the crimes and evils that follow in its train, that it has its glory in the eyes of men.

The fate of a battle is the result of a moment, of a thought: the hostile forces advance with various combinations, they attack each other and fight for a certain time; the critical moment arrives, a mental flash decides, and the least reserve accomplishes the object.

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defence.

Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the genius of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debt and taxes. And armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few.

Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty,—familiarity with danger enabling him to estimate the danger. He sees how much is the risk, and is not afflicted with imagination; knows practically Marshal Saxe’s rule, that every soldier killed costs the enemy his weight in lead.

War, even in the best state of an army, with all the alleviations of courtesy and honor, with all the correctives of morality and religion, is nevertheless so great an evil, that to engage in it without a clear necessity is a crime of the blackest dye. When the necessity is clear, it then becomes a crime to shrink from it.

The conqueror is not so much pleased by entering into open gates, as by forcing his way. He desires not the fields to be cultivated by the patient husbandman; he would have them laid waste by fire and sword. It would be his shame to go by a way already opened.

War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape; and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cannon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

War mends but few, and spoils multitudes; it legitimates rapine and authorizes murder; and these crimes must be ministered to by their lesser relatives, by covetousness and anger and pride and revenge, and heats of blood, and wilder liberty, and all the evil that can be supposed to come from or run to such cursed causes of mischief.

“War,” says Machiavelli, “ought to be the only study of a prince”; and, by a prince, he means every sort of State, however constituted. “He ought,” says this great political doctor, “to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans.” A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.

War suspends the rules of moral obligation, and what is long suspended is in danger of being totally abrogated. Civil wars strike deepest of all into the manners of the people. They vitiate their politics; they corrupt their morals; they pervert even the natural taste and relish of equity and justice. By teaching us to consider our fellow-citizens in a hostile light, the whole body of our nation becomes gradually less dear to us. The very names of affection and kindred, which were the bond of charity, whilst we agreed, become new incentives to hatred and rage, when the communion of our country is dissolved.