Ernest Hemingway Quotes About War

We have collected for you the TOP of Ernest Hemingway's best quotes about War! Here are collected all the quotes about War starting from the birthday of the Author – July 21, 1899! We hope you will be inspired to new achievements with our constantly updated collection of quotes. At the moment, this page contains 37 sayings of Ernest Hemingway about War. We will be happy if you share our collection of quotes with your friends on social networks!
  • Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

    Ernest Hemingway (2016). “A Farewell to Arms”, p.69, Hamilton Books
  • In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

    Peace  
    Ernest Hemingway (2008). “The Good Life According to Hemingway”, Ecco
  • (World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

  • Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

    Men at War introduction (1942)
  • To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, p.112, Simon and Schuster
  • We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.

    Ernest Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on War”, p.304, Simon and Schuster
  • An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

    "Treasury of the Free World". Book by Ben Raeburn. Introduction to the book, 1946.
  • I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.

  • No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

    Peace  
    "Treasury of the Free World". Book by Ben Raeburn. Introduction to the book, 1946.
  • In war, one cannot say what one feels.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, p.328, Simon and Schuster
  • Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, p.468, Simon and Schuster
  • The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.4181, Simon and Schuster
  • Wars are caused by undefended wealth.

    Peace  
  • The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

    Ernest Hemingway (2002). “Death in the Afternoon”, p.12, Simon and Schuster
  • They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades”, p.189, Simon and Schuster
  • War is not won by victory.

    Ernest Hemingway (2012). “A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition”, p.44, Simon and Schuster
  • The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.4177, Simon and Schuster
  • We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war. There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war. Also they make money out of it.

    Ernest Hemingway (1929). “A Farewell to Arms: With an Introd”
  • Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons.

    Ernest Hemingway (2002). “Death in the Afternoon”, p.112, Simon and Schuster
  • And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?

    Ernest Hemingway (2016). “A Farewell to Arms”, p.43, Hamilton Books
  • There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

    Ernest Hemingway, William Kozlenko (1942). “Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time”, New York : Crown Publishers
  • When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.3863, Simon and Schuster
  • Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

    Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on War”, p.27, Simon and Schuster
  • No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

    Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.4181, Simon and Schuster
  • War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.

    Ernest Hemingway, Séan A. Hemingway (2003). “Hemingway on war”, Scribner Book Company
  • You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

    "For Whom the Bell Tolls".
  • The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.

  • For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

    Peace  
  • No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

    Peace  
    Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway (2012). “Hemingway on War”, p.27, Simon and Schuster
  • Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.

    "Hemingway and Dietrich letters". www.telegraph.co.uk. April 3, 2007.
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