War Psychology Quotes

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.

Be skeptical of concepts that divorce war from its political nature, particularly those that promise fast, cheap victory through technology.

War has a deeper and more ineffable relation to hidden grandeurs in man than has yet been deciphered.

When [men] go to war, what they want is to impose on their enemies the victor's will and call it peace.

I do know that I've read somewhere that it's been statistically proven that in times of war, horror films are much more popular. I don't know why that is. You'd think it'd be the opposite. You'd think people would want to escape from it.

In war, the chief incalculable is the human will.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

Battles are won in the hearts of men.

I'm sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men who made war as you study an absurdity. They'll be shocked, just as today we're shocked with cannibalism.

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

They [US soldiers] started to commit suicide on the Baghdad walls. We will encourage them to double their suicide attempts.

I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale.

War starts in the mind, not in the body.

War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.

I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.

Air Power is, above all, a psychological weapon - and only short-sighted soldiers, too battle-minded, underrate the importance of psychological factors in war.

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

War is delightful for those who don't know it

… once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire.

There was very little suicide among the men of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying fear of being killed by others.

The very existence of armaments and great armies psychologically accustoms us to accept the philosophy of militarism. They inevitably increase fear and hate in the world.

After engaging in acts of war against another nation, there exists a degree of uncertainty in terms of the enemy's reactions. War inspires an unpredictable psychology and evokes strong emotions that defy systems analysis quantification.

In war the psychological factors are often decisive. An adversary who feels inferior is in reality so.