We discuss a purely variational approach to the study of a wide class of second order nonhomogeneous dissipative hyperbolic PDEs. Precisely, we focus on the wave-like equations that present also a nonzero source term and a first-order-in-time linear term. The paper carries on the research program initiated in [14], and developed in [15,21], on the De Giorgi approach to hyperbolic equations.Hence, the link with (1) is immediate: as ε ↓ 0, supposing that f ε → f and w ε → w, one formally obtains (1) (and (2)) in the limit.A first comment is in order. The paper provides a purely variational method for proving existence of (weak) solutions to second order hyperbolic PDEs with dissipation, that is, wave-like