Quotes by British Authors - Page 663

Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view . . . is not enough; what matters even more is . . . adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards." — as quoted in "High Financier" by Niall Ferguson
Siegmund Warburg
This arrogant, perfumed young noble, in his rustling silks and polished lamellar armour, knew nothing of the hardships of war.
David Pilling
It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.
Dean F. Wilson
The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics.
Emmeline Pankhurst
It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.
Eric Hobsbawm
As long as the forest stood the Tchetchens were unconquerable... and it is literally the fact that they were beaten in the long run not by the sword but by the axe.
John F. Baddeley
I’m tired of your revenge, your anger, your hate. The war is killing you.
Sally Green
It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.
Vera Brittain
England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
Robert Graves
Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.
Kazuo Ishiguro
I had him in my cab once.Who? Neville askedRupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England".That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?
Pat Barker
History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.
Enoch Powell
...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field
Joe Abercrombie
When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: " We've won the war! " They only said: " The War is over.
Vera Brittain
Brianna’s looking for Drake,” Edilio said, thinking out loud.“You sent her out against Drake?” Albert demanded.“Sent her? Who sends Brianna out to get into a fight? She goes on her own. Anyway, it’s not like you’ve left us with anyone else.”Albert had the decency not to say anything to that.“You know, you guys put me in charge. I didn’t ask to be in charge. I didn’t want to be in charge. Sam was in charge and all you guys ever did was give him grief,” Edilio said. “You two, especially.” He pointed at Albert and Astrid. “So, okay, Astrid takes over. And then Astrid finds out it’s not so much fun being in charge. So it’s like, okay, let’s get the dumb wetback to do the job.”“No one ever—,” Astrid protested.“And me, like a fool, I’m thinking, okay, that must mean people trust me. They asked me to be in charge, be the mayor. Come to find out, I’m not making decisions; Albert’s making decisions. Albert’s deciding we need to find more water and sending our two best fighters off into the countryside. Now I’m supposed to fix everything? It’s like you go, ‘Fight a war,’ but you sent my army off on a wild goose chase.
Michael Grant
We will continue to march, even if everything shatters, because today Germany hears us, and tomorrow, the whole world. And because of the Great War, the world lies in ruins, but devil may care, we build it up again.
Rhidian Brook
The gods demand entertainment. They demand trial and contest. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at each other's throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe's end
Chris Wraight
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.
Graham Greene
It will never end.Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.
Bernard Cornwell
Dawn, slowly filling Church Street with grey light, disclosed another day of war. Because it did this, this dawn bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday. Thus it seemed that dawn itself had been grimly harnessed to the war effort.
Patrick Hamilton
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
Graham Greene
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
Graham Greene
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
Graham Greene
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
Graham Greene
Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
Graham Greene
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.
Graham Greene
One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
Graham Greene
The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line.
George Orwell
All you could do was hope for silence, for still air.
Peter Akinti
Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.
Patrick Hamilton
This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
Virginia Woolf
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies... Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
George Orwell
They might watch American movies, wear American clothes, even read American books but Bush and the Iraq War have made actual American people social lepers; she only has to open her mouth in some places to feel a wave of loathing directed at her. Katie is weary of pointing out that at least half her countrymen detest their President even more than Europe does, but it’s no good.
Amanda Craig
Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.
Sarah Moss
History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.
Terry Pratchett
When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
George Orwell
Sam. Brianna is dead.”He just stared at her. Then, in a soft, almost childlike voice, he said, “Breeze?”“She stopped Gaia. It looked like Brianna almost killed her. The second time she . . . But this time . . .”There were tears in Sam’s eyes. “My God. How is Dekka?”“Like you’d expect. Destroyed. Roger’s dead, too, so Edilio . . . It’s been really bad, Sam. Really bad. It’s like we’re in a war.”“We are.
Michael Grant
The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you're facing is a mere mortal, no different from you-- which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help your keep your mental balance.
Robert Greene
I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.
Jake Wood
I myself beheld the King Charge at the head of all his Table Round, And all his legions crying Christ and him, And break them; and I saw him, after, stand High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume Red as the rising sun with heathen blood, And seeing me, with a great voice he cried, "They are broken, they are broken!" for the King, However mild he seems at home, nor cares For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts— For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs Saying, his knights are better men than he— Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives No greater leader.
Alfred Tennyson
I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.
Evelyn Waugh
The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
Chris Cleave
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?”“I should rather die.”“You nearly did.”“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.
Chris Cleave
Then I’m tempted to die just to … spite him.”“That’s the spirit that will win us the war.
Chris Cleave
There in the sweet sacking smell of the mail bags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home.
Chris Cleave
Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.
Simon Winder
Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
Michael Ignatieff
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece ofspecious humbug designed to conceal it's desire for economic control ofthe Southern states.
Charles Dickens
Of the 403,272 tank soldiers (including a small number of women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die. Even the most optimistic troops knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew—or those at least who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself—would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armored coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply “boiling up.” The tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable. “Have you burned yet?” was a question tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. “I’m sorry,” the young man replies. “I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.
Catherine Merridale
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.
Chris Cleave
I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”“Oh god, is it wartime already?”“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.
Chris Cleave
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?
Anthony Trollope
[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
Sir Laurens van der Post
... Blood pounded inside his skull.The pounding became more distinct. A thundering and a racing of hoofs, rising like a storm over the hills to the north. The triumphant baying of the Saxon war-horns was echoed by others, more distant. These were higher, shriller, the prelude to the storm.Cavalry bugles. Bedwyr's lungs were full of smoke and blood, else he would have laughed.The dragon had come at last.
David Pilling
She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing—ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!
Mary Charlton
War has often been called a game, with good reason. Both have combatants. Both have sides. Both carry the risk of losing.
Samantha Shannon
You can't win because of the guns," said Adam with a sigh. "Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.
Simon Tolkien
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad.
George Orwell
I thought I lost you""You will never lose me." Paul kissed the top of her head. "And even if I have to leave, you must know that I will come back to you again. If you'll wait for me?
Caroline Leech