Be It Resolved: War is a Human Pestilence

War should be the only study of a prince.  He should consider peace only as a breathing time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute, military plans.
Machiavelli, The Prince

It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one, since its beginning and end are not under the control of the same man.  Anyone, even a coward, can commence a war, but it can be brought to an end only with the consent of the victors.
Sallust, Jugurtha

Military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity and cowardice, and the defence of nations must be undertaken by the civil enterprise of men enjoying all the rights and liberties of citizenship.
G.Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island

Every position must be held to the last man; there must be no retirement.  With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.
Field-Marshall Sir Douglas Haig, Order of the Day, 12 April, 1918

And Caesar's spirit, raging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry "Havoc", and let slip the dogs of war.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.  (Dulce bellum inexpertis.)
Erasmus, Adagia

To those to whom war is necessary it is just; and a resort to arms is righteous for those to whom no other hope remains.  (Justum est bellum, quibus necessarium; et pia arma, quibus nulla nisi in armis relinquitur opes.)
Livy, History

A really great people, proud and high-spirited, would face all the disasters of war rather than purchase that base prosperity which is bought at the price of national honor.
Theodore Roosevelt, Speech, Harvard University, 23 February 1907

It is more important to know that we are on God's side.
Abraham Lincoln, Retort, to a deputation of Southerners during the Civil War, whose spokesman had remarked, "We trust, Sir, that God is on our side."

Cannon to right of the,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade

As when that devilish iron engine, wrought
In deepest hell, and fram'd by fury's skill,
With windy nitre and quick sulphur fraught,
And ramm'd with bullet round, ordain'd to kill,
Conceiveth fire, the heavens it doth fil'
With thundering noise, and all the air doth choke,
That none can breathe, nor see, nor hear at will,
Through smouldry cloud of duskish stinking smoke,
That th' onely breath him daunts, who hath escap'd the stroke.
Spenser, Faerie Queene

Doughboys were paid a whole dollar a day
and received free burial under the clay.
And movie heroes are paid even more
shooting one another in a Hollywood war.
Alfred Kreymborg, What Price Glory?

Remember, men of guns and rhymes,
and kings who kill so fast,
That men you kill too many times
May be too dead at last.
Rose O'Neill, When the Dead Men Die

War loves to seek its victims in the young.
Sophocles, Scyrii

War should be undertaken in such a way as to show that its only object is peace.  (Bellum autem ita suscipiatur, ut nihil aliud nisi pax quaesita videatur.)
Cicero, De Officiis