Call of Duty 2/Mission Quotes

One of the many quotes in the game.

Like the original Call of Duty, every time you die or win a battle in any of the single player missions a quote will appear on the screen from someone famous. Some are specifically about war, whilst others are about courage, determination, etc. These are all randomly selected in the game and are ordered alphabetically.

A-D

Aristotle

• "We make war that we may live in peace."

John Quincy Adams

• "Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air."

Napoleon Bonaparte

• "Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily."
• "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."
• "He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat."
• "You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war."
• "Soldiers usually win the battles and generals get the credit for them."
• "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."
• "There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."

Edward Burke

• "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing."

General Omar Bradley

• "In war there is no prize for the runner-up."
• "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."

George Gordon Byron

• "For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd; And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!"

Stanley Baldwin

• "War would end if the dead could return."

Winston Churchill

• "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
• "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
• "If you are going through hell...keep going."
• "No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it."
• "When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."
• "Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter."
• "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
• "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
• "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

Cicero

• "Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts."

Croesus

• "In peace the sons bury their fathers, but in war the fathers bury their sons."

Georges Clemenceau

• "I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war."
• "War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory."

E-I

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war."
• "A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer."
• "Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."
• "The characteristic of a genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic."

Albert Einstein

• "So long as there are men there will be wars."
• "We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart."

Erasmus

• "War is delightful to those who have not experienced it."

Thomas Edison

• "There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever."

Francois Fenelon

• "All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers."

John Arbuthnot Fisher

• "The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is imbecility."

Ulysses S. Grant

• "I have never advocated war except as a means of peace."

Kahlil Gibran

• "Safeguarding the rights of others is the most noble and beautiful end of a human being."

Ernest Hemingway

• "Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime."
• "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
• "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."

Herbert Hoover

• "Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight."

Horace

• "In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war."

Ali Ibn-Abi-Talib

• "He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere."

J-N

Thomas Jefferson

• "War is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is to the sufferer."

Kosovar

• "You know the real meaning of peace only if you have been through the war."

Barbara Kingsolver

• "There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature."

Abraham Lincoln

• "There's no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war. Except its ending."

Robert E. Lee

• "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it."

General Douglas MacArthur

• "It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it."
• "In war, you win or lose, live or die-and the difference is just an eyelash."
• "The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war."
• "They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them."
• "In war there is no substitute for victory."

John Stuart Mill

• "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 or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Andre Maurois

• "Above all things, never be afraid. The enemy who forces you to retreat is himself afraid of you at that very moment."

James Morrow

• "There are no atheists in foxholes" isn't an argument against atheism, it's an argument against foxholes."

Edvard Munch

• "From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity."

Jose Narosky

• "In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."

O-S

George Orwell

• "The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

General George S. Patton

• "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
• "It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."
• "Better to fight for something than live for nothing."
• "Courage is fear holding on a minute longer."
• "If a man does his best, what else is there?"
• "May God have mercy on my enemies, because I won't"

Plato

• "Only the dead have seen the end of the war."

Persius

• "He who conquers, endures."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

• "When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."
• "Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them."

Bertrand Russell

• "War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
• "Patriots always talk of dying for their country and never of killing for their country."

Will Rogers

• "You can't say civilization don't advance - for in every war, they kill you in a new way."

Joseph Stalin

• "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."
• "Death solves all problems - no man, no problem."
• "In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance."
• "If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves."

General William Tecumseh Sherman

• "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror."
• "War is cruel and you cannot refine it."

Solomon Short

• "The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky."

William Shakespeare

• "We happy few, we band of brothers/For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother."
• "Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once."

T-W

Sun-Tzu

• "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

Voltaire

• "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."

Walt Whitman

• "Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books."

H. G. Wells

• "If we don't end war, war will end us."

General William Westmoreland

• "The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars."

John Wayne

• "Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway."