"I don't mind watching brutal thugs die. Everyone is better off, so you should celebrate, not be sorry." - Buff
"War is horrible, but slavery is worse." - Winston Churchill
"In fact, no one is in the "grip of fear" over anthrax except the media and their most gullible targets, liberal women. Liberal soccer moms are precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for linear thinking." - Ann Coulter
"The reality is that there are few ways more effective at "settling anything" and "resolving problems" (at least, certain kinds of problems) than war. It's an extremely effective tool, actually. The reason we don't resort to it more often is because it is appallingly expensive in blood and treasure, and horribly risky (you can lose). But the reason that war is the last resort in international relations when diplomacy fails is because war can settle things even when diplomacy does not." - Steven Den Beste
"There are a lot of words one can use, rightly or wrongly, to describe war. But "useless" isn't defensible. War is brutal. War is terrible. War is costly. But to say that it is useless is to say that it isn't possible for it to yield any result at all which we consider valuable, and that is provably false from a straightforward examination of any reasonable history book." - Steven Den Beste
"A strong defense is the surest way to peace. Strength makes detente attainable. Weakness invites war."- Gerald R. Ford
"If we go to war with Iraq, the Europeans will shudder at our belligerence as if we'd used a cheese knife on a piece of fish. They will argue that the European way and the international system can solve everything without violence. And they will simply be wrong, but sophisticatedly so." - Jonah Goldberg
"I have never advocated war except as a means of peace." - General Ulysses S. Grant
"I hope by now you think of me not as one of the chest-thumping idiots of the “Nuke’em all and don’t even let God sort’em out” crowd. Lives will be lost, many for no good reason. War is a damnable business. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t the most wretchedly interesting thing in the world." - Stephen Green
"Had Hitler waited just six more months to invade Poland, then Molotov and Ribbentrop would have shared the 1939 [Nobel Peace] prize." - Stephen Green
The closer we get to war, the more the NYT editorial page reminds me of Michael Dukakis in 1988 -- a little geeky guy with little charisma and little sense of the American people's mood." - Stephen Green
"Our dirty trick department is working overtime." - Adm. William F. Halsey, Pingry Alum
"And, yes, you ARE a terrorist for empathizing with the 9/11 hijackers, since only terrorists think that way. Mmm, McCarthy-riffic. Really, anyone who thinks they have any justification whatsoever, needs to have the moral relativism beaten out of them." - David Hauptmann, on Michael "Stupid White Man" Moore
"Violence, naked force has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid with their lives and freedoms." - Robert A. Heinlein
"The European Union could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag." - Jesse Helms
"Watching war on TV is much, much better than watching porn." - Lowell Jacobson
"American simplicity liberated Europe three times in the last century. We stumbled our way around lacking Gallic sophistication, liberating your country twice from the Germans and all of Europe once from Communism." - Charles Krauthammer
"You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting." - General Curtis E. LeMay
"I say to our enemies: We are coming. God may have mercy on you, but we won't" - John McCain
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself" - John Stuart Mill
"I cannot tell you how proud watching that war coverage makes me. I know a lot of people are saying that they think that it's, that you know what we're doing is imperialistic. I watch the way we handle ourselves over there and I've never felt more patriotic in my life." - Dennis Miller
"I know you [liberals] are all cranky about 'there's no link between Iraq and al Qaeda.' How about this: they both think America's Satan, isn't that a good starting point? There's no reason to think they don't have each other on lunatic speed dial." - Dennis Miller
"It is stupid for anybody in the world to say they're for war. But I am for this war because, you know, we've got to protect ourselves now. And we've got to remind the world that there is a point that we will not be pushed past before the fucking hammer comes down. Now, the simple fact is, do I think Saddam Hussein can bury the nuclear jumper from the top of the key? No, I don't. He's a putz. But I do think he can distribute the ball going down the lane and I think we've got to smack him around. It's time to circle the SUVs!" - Dennis Miller
"The simple fact is, you've got to view this war like we've been on a long family car ride. Bush is the father and he's been screaming [gestures with arm as if a driver scolding kids in back seat] 'don't make me come back there!' for around 200 miles now and it just reached the point where we had to pull the car over and the bad kid is going to get the spanking of his life." - Dennis Miller
"The New York Times will decide to support a war as soon as they find out Saddam has opened an all-male golfing club in Tikrit." - Dennis Miller
"It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the campus organizer, who gives us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." - Father Dennis Edward O'Brien, Sergeant, USMC
"Sure, the war in Iraq was a quagmire. It was just a short quagmire. On the spectrum of quagmires, it was the shortest since the Six Day War. " - Jonathan Rauch
"The Cold War was a five-decade confrontation in which the United States often found itself aligned in awkward and even obnoxious ways but remained, through it all, on the right side of history. In the end, the Soviet Union fell not because of Star Wars or glasnost, but because Communism was a dysfunctional system that lost the ability to fool even its friends." - Jonathan Rauch
"Dear Osama:
Why do we hate you? Because you killed 3,000 Americans and want to kill more. And when you kill Americans, you're dead meat -- and so is anyone who helps you, and maybe anyone who sympathizes too loudly. The question now isn't whether you will win. It's whether the Bush Administration will succeed in disposing of you and your cause before you provoke a response that will cause Arab civilization, such as it is, to join the Aztecs, the Carthaginians, and others who overplayed their brutal hand against a superior foe." - Glenn Harlan Reynolds"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." - Will Rogers
"The last thing we want to see is a smoking gun. A gun smokes after it's been fired… If someone waits for a smoking gun, it's certain we will have waited too long." - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
" 'Anti-idiotarian' noun. Someone opposed to a whole raft of political values which are derived from a fundamentally irrational meta-context (world view). Anti-idiotarians can be found across a wide section of the political spectrum and are primarily characterised by vocal rational judgmentalism, generally hawkish sentiments and transcendent loathing of Noam Chomsky." - Libertarian Samizdata
"At its best, war is a lesser evil. That's it. If you have to crush a regime and its armies to end the far worse things they've been doing — as we did to Japan and Germany in World War II, and to the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan — your actions are entirely justifiable in the death-for-death and misery-for-misery moral economics of war. Inflict a lesser misery to end a greater one. End of story." - Doc Searls
"War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the sooner it will be over." - General William Tecumseh Sherman
"After Sept. 11, a friend in London said to me she couldn't stand all the America-needs-to-ask-itself stuff because she used to work at a rape crisis center and she'd heard this blame-the-victim routine a thousand times before. But, even so, it comes as a surprise to realize the multiculti apologists do exactly the same with actual rape victims." - Mark Steyn
"You don't invade Iraq in order to invade everywhere else, you invade Iraq so you don't have to invade everywhere else." - Mark Steyn
"Our first duty to freedom is to defend our own." - Margaret Thatcher
"There's a saying, "If we follow an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, the whole world ends up blind and toothless." I would add the corollary, "But if you kill the sonsofbitches, you're still there with both your eyes and all your teeth." That's the logic of war." - Alan S. Thorpe
"When they bombed the Trade Center I couldn't believe what was going on. We've fought many enemies at different times. But we knew who they were and where they were. These people, we don't know who they are or where they are. That's the point that bothers me. Because they're gonna strike again, I'll put money on it. And it's going to be damned dramatic. But they're gonna do it in their own sweet time. We've got to get into a position where we can kill the bastards. None of this business of taking them to court, the hell with that. I wouldn't waste five seconds on them." - Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay
"No plan survives contact with the enemy." - Helmuth von Moltke
"History is crystal clear on one point, and that is that power – the exercise of raw military and political force – is the only effective cure for dictators and fascists, whatever flag they fly. It is not only morally justified to confront such evil; it is immoral not to do so." - Bill Whittle
"The most important emancipator of Japanese women was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who made women's suffrage occupation policy. The liberators of Afghan women wore U.S. battle dress." - George F. Will
"When the world is at peace, a gentleman keeps his sword by his side." - Ho Yen-hsi