Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.

Everyone's a pacifist between wars. It's like being a vegetarian between meals.

Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it.

Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are in finishing it.

To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer read more

To conquer the enemy without resorting to war is the most desirable. The highest form of generalship is to conquer the enemy by strategy.

All quiet along the Potomac they say
Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as read more

All quiet along the Potomac they say
Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat, to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.

If war should sweep our commerce from the seas, another generation will restore it. If war exhausts our treasury, future read more

If war should sweep our commerce from the seas, another generation will restore it. If war exhausts our treasury, future industry will replenish it. If war desiccate and lay waste our fields, under new cultivation they will grow green again and ripen to future harvest. If the walls of yonder Capitol should fall and its decorations be covered by the dust of battle, all these can be rebuilt. But who shall reconstruct the fabric of a demolished government; who shall dwell in the well-proportioned columns of constitutional liberty; who shall frame together the skillful architecture which unites sovereignty with state's rights, individual security with prosperity?

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

Waging war we understand, but not waging peace, or at any rate less consciously so.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment read more

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

Neither ridiculous shriekings for revenge by French chauvinists,
nor the Englishmen's gnashing of teeth, nor the wild gestures of read more

Neither ridiculous shriekings for revenge by French chauvinists,
nor the Englishmen's gnashing of teeth, nor the wild gestures of
the Slavs will turn us from our aim of protecting and extending
German influence all the world over.

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no read more

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.