Quotes by Journalists - Page 210

On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.
Martha Gellhorn
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
In a war of truth and lie, lie retreats always with shame and pity.
Ehsan Sehgal
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
Sir Laurens van der Post
In a sea of human beings, it is difficult, at times even impossible, to see the human as being.
Aysha Taryam
It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.
Frank Herbert
He won’t stop the war until you give him the peace prize.
Mohammed Hanif
[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
No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.
Martha Gellhorn
I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.
Martha Gellhorn
War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.Wartime looks like this.
Janine Di Giovanni
... 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
Well, good luck,’ the Vietnam verbal tic...It was as though people couldn’t stop themselves from saying it, even when they actually meant to express the opposite wish, like, ‘Die, motherfucker.’ Usually it was only an uninhabited passage of dead language, sometimes it came out five times in a sentence, like punctuation, often it was spoken flat side up to telegraph the belief that there wasn’t any way out; tough shit, sin loi, smack it, good luck. Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck: to friends in the press corps going out on operations, to grunts I’d meet at firebases and airstrips, to the wounded, the dead and all the Vietnamese I ever saw getting fucked over by us and each other, less often but most passionately to myself, and though I meant it every time I said it, it was meaningless. It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’ You could make all the ritual moves, carry your lucky piece, wear your magic jungle hat, kiss your thumb knuckle smooth as stones under running water, the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion. All you could say that wasn’t fundamentally lame was something like, ‘He who bites it this day is safe from the next,’ and that was exactly what nobody wanted to hear.
Michael Herr
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
Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.
Carsten Jensen
Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.
Upton Sinclair
...but the power of spilled blood overwhelmed the good intentions of those who wanted to end the violence.
Jeffrey Goldberg
It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don't know what's possible until you actually see it.
Amanda Lindhout
For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.
Albert Camus
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.
Albert Camus
And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.
Albert Camus
And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.
Albert Camus
It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
Albert Camus
We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.
Albert Camus
I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?
Albert Camus
You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.
Albert Camus
In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.
Albert Camus
…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.
Albert Camus
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Albert Camus
I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.
Nancy Wake
Do you want to know what General Putnam is thinking? It’s this. He’s thinking that he can’t win the war if he doesn’t keep the people on his side. He’s thinking that he can’t keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population—raping the women, stealing cattle, burning houses. He is determined to scare the wits out of the troops to keep them in line. And he’s thinking that it doesn’t matter very much who he executes to do it. So many men have died, so many mothers have wept, so many brothers and sisters have cried. He is thinking that in the long run if he executes somebody, he’ll shorten the war and save more lives. It doesn’t matter to him very much who he executes; one man’s agony is like another’s, one mother’s tears are no wetter than anybody else’s. And that’s why he’s going to have Sam shot.
James Lincoln Collier
And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
Omar El Akkad
Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand - why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.
Winston Groom
I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.
Winston Groom
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
Omar El Akkad
I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, 'Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way.
Winston Groom
Bubba then grabbed a hold of my leg and his eyes got all cloudy and that terrible pink sky seem to drain all the colour in his face. He was trying to say something, and so I bent over real close to hear what it was. But I never could make it out. So I asked the medic, ' You hear what he say?' And the medic say, 'Home. He said, home.' Bubba, he died, and that's all I got to say about that.
Winston Groom
At dawn, they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the shit damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all signed and burnt up - come running out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing and sweating and scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!
Winston Groom
After a while, they start landing some relief in helicopters, and I guess the napalm bomb have frightened away the gooks. They must of figured that if we was willing to do that to ourselves, then what the hell would we of done to them? They taking the wounded out of there, when along come Sergeant Kranz, hair all singed off, clothes burnt up, looking like he just got shot out of a cannon.
Winston Groom
There was some people hurt far worst than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas.
Winston Groom
There was a guy next to my cot name of Dan, who had been blowed up inside a tank. He was all burnt and had tubes going in and out of him everyplace, but I never heard him holler. He talk real low and quiet, and after a day or so, him and me got to be friends. Dan came from the state of Connecticut, and he was a teacher of history when they grabbed him up and threw him into the Army. But because he was smart, they sent him to officer school and made him a lieutenant. Most of the lieutenants I know were about as simple minded as me, but Dan was different. He had his own philosophy about why we were here, which was that we were doing maybe the wrong thing for the right reasons, or vice-versa, but whatever it is, we ain't doing it right. Him being a tank officer and all, he say it ridiculous for us to be waging a war in a place where we can't hardly use our tanks on account of the land is mostly swamp or mountains. I told him about Bubba and all, and he nod his head very sadly and said there will be a lot more Bubbas to die before this thing is over.
Winston Groom
The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.
George Packer
Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
Everyone fights an American war.
Omar El Akkad
It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.
Omar El Akkad
Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!""Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:"Just look at me.
Gabriel García Márquez
She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California...the girl's eyes are open. She seems to be cowering...Graves reaches in to pick her up- thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her...when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out.
Evan Wright
I cruised into this war thinking my buddy's going to take a bullet, and I'm going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm's way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad's car.
Evan Wright
The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
Sebastian Junger
Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
Sebastian Junger
The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
the worst thing we can do, the absolute worst, is to do nothing.
Fritz Gerlich
History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.
Thomas B. Costain
But not all Gaza residents were committed to the war. A reporter asked one of the Arabs what he most wanted. He was a taxi driver, father of ten. All he wanted was 'to eat and to work.' What did he think of Nasser? 'Nasser is good, Israel is good, America is good, Britain is good, Canada is good, India is good, Anything is good.
Robert John Donovan
As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)
Christopher Hitchens
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
Christopher Hitchens
McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory. This was why counterinsurgency - blanketing the population in safety and winning them over - was necessary.
Bob Woodward
During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war.'If we're not successful here,' Jones said, 'you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' A setback or loss for the United States would be 'a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world' and provide 'a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don't need much.'Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, 'It's certainly a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of religions. It's a clash of almost concepts of how to live.' The conflict is that deep, he said. 'So I think if you don't succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places.'Second, if we don't succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.'Third, 'I say, be careful you don't over-Americanize the war. I know that we're going to do a large part of it,' but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome.Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces.It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline?
Bob Woodward
Almost everything about Afghanistan was troubling Mullen. As Obama was giving intense focus on the war, Mullen was feeling more personal responsibility. Afghanistan had been marked by 'incredible neglect,' he told some of his officers. 'It's almost like you're on a hunger strike and you're on the 50th day, and all of a sudden you're going to try to feed this person. Well, they're not going to eat very quickly. I mean, every organ in the body is collapsing. The under-resourcing of Afghanistan was much deeper and wider than even I thought. It wasn't just about troops. It was intellectually, it was strategically, it was physically, culturally.
Bob Woodward
I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.
Charles Bowden