I want to use this as a chapter heading quote in a piece that I’m writing, but I would really like an attribution for it. It’s not in my Bartlett’s 16th Ed., nor can I find it anywhere on the Web using just about any search engine. I’ve had it in a quote file for years without attribution, and have no memory of where I got it.
Can anyone help? Thanks!
– Bob
All I can say, is it sounds like it might be referring to Abraham Lincoln. That might give you some leads… Or it might just be another dead end.
Chronos,
Don’t be so modest.
Just wolfin’ you. 
Weird. I’m reading Joseph Heller’s Picture This right now, and I swear I read a very similar passage just today. In typical Heller fashion, he attributes it to “Lyndon Johnson, quoting Lincoln and paraphrasing Hitler.” Or something like that.
Unfortunately, my book is at work and I’m living the life of an insomniac. I’ll try to find it for you tomorrow.
*And it led as well to that prolonged sequence of events in which Athens suffered defeat; the empire was destroyed; the democracy was outlawed and restored; Socrates and Asclepius were tried, found guilty, and executed; Plato wrote his philosophies and started his school; Aristotle came to Athens as a student and departed as a fugitive and was later, during a different war, painted by Rembrandt in Amsterdam contemplating a bust of Homer that was a copy, and, as a consequence of this, as a conclusion to centuries of hazardous travels, and as a matter of verifiable fact, made in 1961 his triumphant passage from the Parke-Bernet Galleries on Madison Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in the city now called New York to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street before John F. Kennedy was shot between the Korean War and the Vietnam War and was succeeded as president of the United States by Lyndon B. Johnson, who, counseled by an inner circle of educated dumbbells associated mainly with Harvard and other prestigious universities, lied to the American people and the American Congress and secretly and deceitfully took the nation openly into a war in Southeast Asia it could not win and did not, persevering obstinately on that destructive course as resolutely as did Pericles when he moved Athens ahead onto her self-destructive course of war with Sparta.
"We make war that we may live in peace," said Lyndon Johnson, quoting Aristotle, who was embarrassed, and paraphrasing Adolf Hitler.
The desire of some men for peace is a frequent cause of war. *–Joseph Heller, Picture This
Have you tried Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or perhaps Musashi’s A Book of Five Rings?
Yow. What a mouthful. Doesn’t help me, though. <sigh> Thanks anyway.
I admit, it does sound a little like Sun Tzu; fortunately, I have a copy of The Art of War that I will consult right away.
I’ll have to find a copy of Musashi, though; I don’t own that one.
Thanks!
Perhaps a little Machiovelli? Maybe from The Prince? The next sentence could be something like, “So make sure to kill that man right away.” 
Seriously though, it could be Machiovelli.