War Motivations Quotes

The United States invaded Iraq to gain control of one of the major sources of the world's energy.

Wars are not a choice we make for no reason.

A war is never undertaken by the ideal state, except in defense of its honor or its safety.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

I think soldiers are not just one homogenous group, just like Americans aren't. They all have different feelings about the war.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

The Civil War was started over economic issues, not slavery. The War was not popular in the North until the issue of slavery was added at a later time to turn it into a moral crusade.

For the average person, 98 percent of those who fought in the Civil War, they did not own slaves. They were simply answering the call, and in this case many, many young men - 17, 18 years old - coming in to defend what they saw as a federal invasion of Virginia, and they fought honorably.

In reviewing the history of the English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.

William McKinley waged a war against Spain for no national interest except America's alleged "friendship" toward the Cuban rebels and our "traditional" anticolonialism. The only economic interest involved, namely Wall Street investors in Cuba, opposed the prospective war, since they preferred doing business with Cuba's Spanish overlords rather than with the insurgents. When McKinley started the war, however, the great "powers" of Wall Street promptly shut up and went along.

I think the Iraq War is not particularly tailored to American interests.

As history reminds us again and again, wars are not always made on the basis of rational calculations: often the contrary.

Why do men go to war? Is it not in some way to better their condition. All these new fangled notions that men fight for other things than their own personal advantage is pure delusion. It is the solid things of life that men are ever after, though some of them haven't the courage to admit it. What is love of country but love of it's good things?

If America can go to the moon, then in the decades to come we should not ever have to have young Americans sent to any part of the world to defend and die for America's gluttony on fossil fuel.

… absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.

Wars have economies. And I don't mean financial economies, although that's often part of it. Why do people continue fighting these wars? There are financial incentives.

One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with the time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.

Our sole aim was, by virtue of this war, to rid ourselves of the lot of them, however many international decisions there were. Each one represented a blow to our...independence.

Civil war, now, 100 years in the future - the things that motivate human beings, they don't change emotionally.

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.

What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

I didn’t think that all these soldiers cared about slavery, but they did.

Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.

Chuchill has renounced all British interests in Europe and those of his people who are not blind now realise that the pretext for this war was far removed from the cause of it, namely, the subservience of the so-called democratic politicians to their Jewish masters.