Quotes & Sayings About Total War

Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that. — Simon Jenkins

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. — Rachel Carson

Peter Beinart excoriates the doughface liberals who during the Cold War put anti-imperialism before anti-totalitarianism and demanded total moral purity on the part of the United States, thus opposing any action in the real world to resist Soviet expansionism. If the Democrats were, as he advocates, to return to the Trumanesque anti-totalitarian liberalism that held sway in the party from roughly 1947 to 1972, the party and the country would be better off. — Rich Lowry

War used to be something you could stand on the nearby hill and watch. Now we have total war; everybody's in it. We have total economics as well. Everything affects everybody. The Malaysian currency shakes, and people around the world are seriously affected. — Salman Rushdie

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. — Michael Herr

The author points out that novices to total war, and this Hitler and the British press have in common, overreact to daily events and lose sight of overall strategy. — William Manchester

Technology has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency. What can be done efficiently must be done in the most efficient way - even if what is done happens, for example, to be genocide or the devastation of a country by total war. Even the long-term interests of society, or the basic needs of man himself, are not considered when they get in the way of technology. We waste natural resources, as well as those of undeveloped countries, iron, oil, etc., in order to fill our cities and roads with a congestion of traffic that is in fact largely useless, and is a symptom of the meaningless and futile agitation of our own minds. — Thomas Merton

The United States has faced threats from criminal groups, from terrorists, from spies throughout our history, and we have limited our responses. We haven't resorted to total war every time we have a conflict around the world, because that restraint is what defines us. That restraint is what gives us the moral standing to lead the world. — Edward Snowden

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost.
His heart, the war.
Her face, the battlefield.
With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned.
And ran. — Rick Yancey

War makes rattling good history. — Thomas Hardy

We have to go massively, like we did in the first Gulf War where we destroyed Saddam's ability to take Kuwait. We need to have a coalition that will stand for nothing less than the total destruction of ISIS and we have to be the leader. — John Kasich

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi invited me to breakfast on the eighteenth. Five days before, she had issued a news release saying, "The president's strategy in Iraq has failed," and "The choice is between a Democratic plan for responsible redeployment and the president's plan for an endless war in Iraq." With those comments as backdrop, at the breakfast I urged her to pass the defense appropriations bill before October and to pass the War Supplemental in total, not to mete it out a few weeks or months at a time. I reminded her that the president had approved Petraeus's recommendation for a change of mission in December and told her that Petraeus and Crocker had recommended a sustainable path forward that deserved broad bipartisan support. She politely made clear she wasn't interested. I wasn't surprised. After all, one wouldn't want facts and reality - not to mention the national interest - to intrude upon partisan politics, would one? — Robert M. Gates

You must think I'm a total idiot."
"Nah. I am starting to wonder if you're trying to beat Keefe's record for biggest interspeciesial episode- and if you are, I'm pretty sure you've won. The Great Gulon Incident was epic, but it didn't almost start a war. — Shannon Messenger

No one will deny that the excessive use of alcohol and alcoholic beverages would do more than any other single factor to make impossible a total war effort. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

The children are designated as "Air Force aides of the Hitler youth" and wear military uniforms and become used to handling the anti-aircraft artillery flak guns. 15 and 16 year old children as warriors! If the war still continues to last for a long time, perhaps the babies will be also employed. Total war!! — Friedrich Kellner

Pardon one offence, and you encourage the commission of many. — Publilius Syrus

Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord. — C. Wright Mills

Aggressors cannot wage total war without introducing Socialism. — Ludwig Von Mises

We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be detested in France. — Duke Of Wellington

Through cruelty force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence . . . We see weakness dawning at the very height of force. Unable to admit that total destruction is impossible, the conqueror can only reply to the mute defiance of his defenseless adversary with an ever-growing violence. — Rachel Bespaloff

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war. — Lester B. Pearson

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it. — Winston Churchill

If war production should remain the only way out of a long-term depression, industrial society would be reduced to the choice between suicide through total war or suicide through total
depression. — Peter Drucker

But total freedom is no more easy to conquer than individual freedom. To ensure man's empire over the
world, it is necessary to suppress in the world and in man everything that escapes the Empire, everything
that does not come under the reign of quantity: and this is an endless undertaking. The Empire must
embrace time, space, and people, which compose the three dimensions of history. It is simultaneously
war, obscurantism, and tyranny, desperately affirming that one day it will be liberty, fraternity, and truth;
the logic of its postulates obliges it to do so — Albert Camus

Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary. — Edmund Burke

You know, God bless him, bless his heart, president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject. — Nancy Pelosi

It is imperative to contest all factions for complete victory, so the army is not garrisoned and the profit can be total. This is the law of strategic siege. — Sun Tzu

Banish your sentimentality (and I have left out the most heart-touching passages): Is there not something fabulously grotesque about a regime that in the midst of total war will pedantically insist that Jews and their spouses either euthanize their own pets or surrender them to the state for extermination? — Christopher Hitchens

The certain way to victory ... lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort ... combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation ... — Yoshijiro Umezu

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. — Robert A. Heinlein

Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we could talk about 'target-rich environments' and 'collateral damage' - that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing - and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the importance of peace.
Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human spirit. — Robert Fisk

The End of World War One
Out of the scraped surface of the land
men began to emerge, like puppies
from the slit of their dam. Up from the trenches
they came out upon the pitted, raw earth
wobbling as if new-born.
They could not believe they would be allowed to live,
the orders had come down: no more killing.
They approached the enemy, holding out chocolate
and cigarettes. They shook hands, exchanged
souvenirs
mess-kits, neckerchiefs.
Some even embraced, while in London
total strangers copulated
in doorways and on the pavement, in the ecstasy
of being reprieved. Nine months later,
like men emerging from the trenches, first the head,
then the body, there were lifted, newborn, from these mothers,
the soldiers of World War Two. — Sharon Olds

We have failed to see that total peace can be as deadly as total war. — Kevin J. Anderson

In Shanghai, there were several pro-right circles of former officers. They realized that the Great War and European revolutions were a direct consequence of rotten liberalism. Words like order, family, discipline and duty didn't mean anything anymore. Civil liberties, so dear to Nina Kupina and people like her, resulted in monstrous egotism and total moral degradation: I do what I want and don't give a damn about others. — Elvira Baryakina

Shortly before the outbreak of the Great War it was calculated that four per cent of the population of England held ninety per cent of all the wealth of the country. In the United States sixty percent of the wealth was held by two per cent of the people while at the other extreme of the social scale sixty-five per cent of the population representing the labor element, the main factor in the production of wealth, possessed no more than five per cent of the total riches of the land. — Joseph Casper Husslein

War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. — Carl Von Clausewitz

He must be able to mystify his officers and men by false reports and appearances, and thus keep them in total ignorance. — Sun Tzu

What, do they run already? Then I die happy. — James Wolfe

The war taught me that nothing counts as much as loyalty" "Bullshit. you still haven't learned that when humans are under pressure, we're all willing to lie" "even to the people we care?" "we lie more to our loved ones, because we care about them so damn much. why do you think we tell the truth to priests and shrinks and total strangers we meet on trains? it's because we don't love them, so we don't care what they think. — Ken Follett

In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total. — G. Edward Griffin

It was amazing to think that the complete Hetzer vehicle, at barely sixteen tonnes, weighed less than the turret on a King Tiger, which I believe weighed eighteen tonnes. How many more Hetzers could Germany have built, for the cost of the five hundred King Tigers which we produced in total in our factories? Two thousand Hetzers, or three thousand? What effect would this have had on the war? Such questions can lead to all manner of calculations and alternatives. — Wolfgang Faust

By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war. — Vladislav Tamarov

Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I - granted the rules were violated at times - we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn't make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler's philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy. By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population. — Ronald Reagan

One must expect a war between U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. which will begin with the total destruction of London. I think the war will last 30 years, and leave a world without civilised people, from which everything will have to build afresh-a process taking say 500 years. Stated just one month after the Hiroshima atomic explosion. Russell became one of the best-known antinuclear activists of his era. — Bertrand Russell

Hillary Clinton was the one pressing the hardest for bombing, and look at what happened. They not only destroyed the country, but Libya has become the center for jihad all over Africa and the Middle East. It's a total disaster in every respect, but it does not matter. Look at the so-called global war on terror. — Noam Chomsky

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, "them" and "us," victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit. — Robert Fisk

In this war, which was total in every sense of the word, we have seen many great changes in military science. It seems to me that not the least of these was the development of psychological warfare as a specific and effective weapon. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now. — Richard Perle

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war. — Dan Simmons

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer ... Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. — Tim O'Brien

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term. — Bob Barr

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total ... because it may well involve the whole world. — Jean-Paul Sartre

We need a total renunciation of war. We must renounce war totally, because now we can destroy all life on earth. — Benjamin Creme

For the man in the street, the philosophies of opposites, particularly Good and Evil, have served as a torture chamber, a crucifix made from metaphor. Thrust into a world which views him as the property of Gods and States and overwhelmed by an unrepayable debt, the metaphysics of slavery and the facts of pain, pleasure and death; bolstered by science, whose theorists have become the whores of the state, man is now informed that he is ill. The proof of this is his refusal to submit completely. The world debt is due to his saying 'no' to total slavery. He will not obey. We are at War, and man is the enemy. The question is: Who is on the other side? — Christopher S. Hyatt

The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It's taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you're throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels. — Ren Ng

It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply. — Raymond E. Feist

It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present. — Gordon Brown

U.S. history that while the nation fought its greatest war against the world's worst racist, it maintained a segregated army abroad and a total system of discrimination at home. — Stephen E. Ambrose

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare. — Victor Hugo

I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today. — Robert McNamara

Now, for the moment, we are safe. The only kind of international violence that worries most people in the developed countries is terrorism: from imminent heart attack to a bad case of hangnail in fifteen years flat. We are very lucky people
but we need to use the time we have been granted wisely, because total war is only sleeping. All the major states are still organized for war, and all that is needed for the world to slide back into a nuclear confrontation is a twist of the kaleidoscope that shifts international relations into a new pattern of rival alliances. — Gwynne Dyer

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end. — Atul Gawande

The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint. — Henry Kissinger

Someone who accepts that in the world as currently divided war can become inevitable, and even just, might reply that the photographs supply no evidence, none at all, for renouncing war - except to those form whom the notions of valor and sacrifice have been emptied of meaning and credibility. The destructiveness of war - short of total destruction, which is not war but suicide - is not in itself an argument against waging war unless one thinks (as few people actually do think) that violence is always unjustifiable, that force is always and in all circumstances wrong - wrong because, as Simone Weil affirms in her sublime essay on war, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force" (1940), violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing. No, retort those who in a given situation see no alternative to armed struggle, violence can exalt someone subjected to it into a martyr or hero. — Susan Sontag

Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut. — David Horsey

President Reagan fueled the spirit of America. His smile, his optimism, his total belief in the ultimate triumph of democracy and freedom, and his willingness to act on that belief, helped end the Cold War and usher in a new and brighter phase of history. — Colin Powell

Lieutenants lied to captains, captains lied to colonels, colonels lied to generals, generals lied to politicians, politicians lied to the people. Right on up and down the line. It was like a complete and total, not a total lie, but just like so much, it was like PR, in other words it was like okay, we've got to sell the war to the American people. — Peter P. Mahoney

Currently we're suffering from the fear instilled into Americans that another 9/11 is just around the corner. We've also been brainwashed into believing the Federal Reserve just saved us from a total financial collapse in the past seven years even though the Fed was one of the most important causes of the crisis. To deal with the threats of another attack and another financial crisis we are expected to complacently accept endless spending, endless debt, endless bailouts, endless inflation by the Federal Reserve, endless spending by the Congress, and even endless war. — Ron Paul

The more extensive the revolution, the more considerable the chances of the war that it
implies. The society born of the revolution of 1789 wanted to fight for Europe. The society born of the
1917 revolution is fighting for universal dominion. Total revolution ends by demanding - we shall see
why - the control of the world. While waiting for this to happen, if happen it must, the history of man, in
one sense, is the sum total of his successive rebellions. In other words, the movement of transition which
can be clearly expressed in terms of space is only an approximation in terms of time. What was devoutly
called, in the nineteenth century, the progressive emancipation of the human race appears, from the
outside, like an uninterrupted series of rebellions, which overreach themselves and try to find their
formulation in ideas, but which have not yet reached the point of definitive revolution where everything
in heaven and on earth would be stabilized. — Albert Camus

What magic was this, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion. One could have believed that the last war these people had fought had left only happy memories, had carried in its wake nothing but joy and prosperity. Women and girls were smiling as if their sons and lovers were invulnerable. — Anna Seghers

The US was forced to withdraw troops from Iraq after an extremely costly decade-long military occupation, leaving in place a regime more closely allied to Iran, the US' regional adversary. The Iraq war depleted the economy, deprived American corporations of oil wealth, greatly enlarged Washington's budget and trade deficits, and reduced the living standards of US citizens. The Afghanistan war had a similar outcome, with high external costs, military retreat, fragile clients, domestic disaffection, and no short or medium term transfers of wealth (imperial pillage) to the US Treasury or private corporations. The Libyan war led to the total destruction of a modern, oil-rich economy in North Africa, the total dissolution of state and civil society, and the emergence of armed tribal, fundamentalist militias opposed to US and EU client regimes in North and sub-Sahara Africa and beyond. Instead — James F. Petras

The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action. — Hunter S. Thompson

I personally am not a total pacifist. I do believe there is such a thing as a just war. I believe, for instance, the effort to destroy the Nazi regime militarily was justified military action. — Marianne Williamson

Arabs and their allies are conducting a total war against Israel. A total war means a war of lies. The PA [Palestinian Authority] promotes lies; lying in Islam is permitted. — Manfred Gerstenfeld

War is a total social phenomenon. In this respect, Clausewitz's analysis is a precursor of Durkheim's sociology. Clausewitz has things to teach us about "mass" violence and contagion. — Rene Girard

International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world. — Eknath Easwaran

In the mighty and almost limitless potential of American industry-the brilliance and rugged determination of its leaders; the skill, energy and patriotism of its workers-there has been welded an almost impregnable defense against the evil designs of any who would threaten the security of the American continent. It is indeed the most forceful and convincing argument yet evolved to restrain the irresponsibility of those who would recklessly bring down upon the good and peace-loving peoples of all the nations of the earth the disaster of total war. — Douglas MacArthur

A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we're constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. — David Graeber

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe. — Henry Miller

Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total - but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial. — Daniel Berrigan

With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man's daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintain the contrary. So if they do maintain it, they are not sincere, they are not patriots and their war policy is a conspiracy against the people. — Hilary Mantel

We have to be faster in calming down a resentment than putting out a fire, because the consequences of the first are infinitely more dangerous than the results of the last; fire ends burning down some houses at the most, while the resentment can cause cruel wars, with the ruin and total destruction of nations ... — Heraclitus

AIDS today in Africa is claiming more lives than the sum total of all wars, famines and floods and the ravages of such deadly diseases as malaria ... We must act now for the sake of the world. — Nelson Mandela

Very few people chose war. They chose selfishness and the result was war. Each of us, individually and nationally, must choose: total love or total war. — David Dellinger

Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can't, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end. — Atul Gawande

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence - Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class - clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. — Glenn Greenwald

Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition [supernatural religion] by programming or choice. — Howard Thompson

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. — John Hersey

There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace. — Benjamin Franklin

But when the pair was cast out of Eden, the Nachash began his campaign to defile every corner of Elohim's good creation. He set up his parody of the mountain of Eden at Mount Hermon, in Bashan, the 'Place of the Serpent.' He was eventually joined by Semjaza, Azazel, and the other fallen Sons of God to pursue their nefarious grand design on Eden. It was the war of the Seed of Nachash with the Seed of Havah, and it was for total conquest. No quarter given. To the victor, complete spoils. Their loss at the Titanomachy was but one battle. — Brian Godawa

Why don't people talk about Japan's wartime emperor Hirohito in the same breath as people do about Germany's Hitler? After all, both had an almost similar role in instigating World War II. In the West, whether it is good or bad, people take full responsibility for their actions, and they have total freedom to express their true feelings. On the contrary, here in the East, it is always the small people who take the blame and are made scapegoats. That is, for you and me, the difference between the West and the East, my friend."

My 7th book is coming....! — Tim I. Gurung

The federal war on drugs is a total failure ... The federal government's going in there and overriding state laws ... Why don't we handle the drugs like we handle alcohol? ... I fear the drug war because it undermines our civil liberties. It magnifies our problems on the borders. We've spent over the last 40 years a trillion dollars on this war and - believe me - the kids can still get the drugs. It just hasn't worked. — Ron Paul

If the military might of Germany and Japan are ultimately to be crushed, the United Nations, one and all, must definitely and urgently strive toward a total war effort. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

The conflict has become like a Middle East version of the Thirty Years' War in Germany four hundred years ago. Too many players are fighting each other for different reasons for all of them to be satisfied by peace terms and to be willing to lay down their arms at the same time. Some still think they can win and others simply want to avoid a defeat. In Syria, as in Germany between 1618 and 1648, all sides exaggerate their own strength and imagine that temporary success on the battlefield will open the way to total victory. Many Syrians now see the outcome of their civil war resting largely with the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. In this, they are probably right. — Patrick Cockburn

The only answer to a regime that wages total cold war is to wage total peace. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

There are certain verses in the Quran which convey injunctions similar to the following: 'Kill them wherever you find them.' (2:191)
Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is total untrue. Such verses relate in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. (pp. 42-43) — Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

Keep in mind that the Iraqis are not telling us anything we don't already know or can't prove. This is what makes this whole inspection process and all the rigmarole surrounding it a total farce. — Rush Limbaugh

Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much! — Aristophanes

Everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull: another sunrise, the lives of heroes, falling in love, war, the discoveries people made about each other. The only thing that didn't bore me, obviously enough, was how much money Tim Price made, and yet in its obviousness it did. There wasn't a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn't figure out why - I couldn't put my finger on it. — Bret Easton Ellis

We must carry the war into every corner the enemy happens to carry it, to his home, to his centers of entertainment: a total war. It is necessary to prevent him from having a moment of peace, a quiet moment outside his barracks or even inside; we must attack him wherever he may be, make him feel like a cornered beast wherever he may move. Then his moral fiber shall begin to decline, but we shall notice how the signs of decadence begin to disappear. — Che Guevara