War Morality Quotes

Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just.

The Bible nowhere prohibits war. In the Old Testament we find war and even conquest positively commanded, and although war was raging in the time of Christ and His apostles, still they said not a word of its unlawfulness and immorality.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were there not innocent civilians there? We are simply taking the rules of engagement that you have invented and turning them back against you.

The nation is too brave, too strong, too powerful, and too just to engage in an unrighteous and precipitate war.

In war you don’t have to be nice, you just have to be right.

War itself is justifiable only on principles of self-preservation:

No government really rooted in parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong …

Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

… war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

It's just as evil to kill Vietnamese as it is to kill Americans.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.

The third rule of ethics of means and ends is that in war the end justifies almost any means.

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.

Take a look at public opinion. About 70 percent of the population, in the polls, said the [Vietnam ] war was fundamentally wrong and immoral, not a mistake. And that attitude lasted as long as polls were taken in the early '80s.

It is folly to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another. For, in a larger sense, it is war itself which is immoral.

I cannot think of any moral definition of anti-war that includes simply ignoring the slaughter of civilians.