Cost Of War Quotes

The genius of America's endless war machine is that, learning from the unpleasantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible.

The cost of war impacts all of us - both in the human cost and the cost that's being felt frankly in places like Flint, Michigan, where families and children are devastated and destroyed by completely failed infrastructure because of lack of investment.

I've seen firsthand the high human cost of war.

Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting. ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

You ask, What is our policy? I will say; 'It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.' You ask, What is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory-victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

THE LONG WALK is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner's memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities ... We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

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

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. I know a great deal of the horrors and tragedies of war. ... The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war.

after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Economically considered, war and revolution are always bad business.

The attainment of the economic aims of man presupposes peace.

History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents.... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.

[T]he essence of so-called war prosperity: it enriches some by what it takes from others. It is not rising wealth but a shifting of wealth and income.

All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

Make wars unprofitable and you make them impossible.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.