Quotes by Soldiers - Page 2

When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we began to denounce this trade in African flesh, and to denounce it in no stinted terms.
W. F. Butler
Besides the moral courage required to accept commissions in the Fifty-fourth at the time it was organizing, physical courage was also necessary, for the Confederate Congress, on May 1, 1863, passed an act, a potion of which read as follow: -Section IV. That every white person being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the Court.
Luis Fenollosa Emilio
The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.
Ernst Jünger
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Philip Sidney
Let each man hear his own music and live by it. The drums roll one way for one man, and another way for another. You have to listen for your own.
Audie Murphy
Evan stares at me.I try to hug him. He takes a step back. I pause, my heart in my throat. I’ve got to reach out to him, let myself be vulnerable. I find the courage, but he backs up again.“You can’t go to Iraq anymore.”“I know.”He looks up at Deanna, then back to me. “Did you fight bad guys? You told me you weren’t.” His voice is suspicious, full of accusation. He doesn’t trust me, and I don’t blame him for that.“No, Evan. I didn’t fight bad guys.”I can’t bring myself to tell him the complete truth. I want so desperately to go back into this fight. I miss it every day. I always felt I could change the world with a rifle in my hands and our flag on my shoulder.“Did you get shot?” he looks me over, apparently searching for bullet wounds.I grin a little. “No, Bud, I didn’t get shot.”“People get shot in Iraq.”“Yes, they do.” It strikes me then that Evan for the first time has a grasp on the dangers that are faced over there. He’s six now, and the world is coming into focus for him.“People get shot, Daddy. They die. Bad guys kill them.”I think of Edward Iwan and Sean Sims.“Yeah, I know they do, Evan.
David Bellavia
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
These summer nights are short. Going to bed before midnight is unthinkable and talk, wine, moonlight and the warm air are often in league to defer it one, two or three hours more. It seems only a moment after falling asleep out of doors that dawn touches one gently on the shoulder, and, completely refreshed, up one gets, or creeps into the shade or indoors for another luxurious couple of hours. The afternoon is the time for real sleep: into the abyss one goes to emerge when the colours begin to revive and the world to breathe again about five o'clock, ready once more for the rigours and pleasures of late afternoon, the evening, and the night.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt
It should make you shake and sweat,nightmare you, strand you in the desertof irrevocable desolation, the consequencesseared into the vein, no matter what adrenalinefeeds the muscle its courage, no matterwhat god shines down on you, no matterwhat crackling pain and angeryou carry in your fists, my friend,it should break your heart to kill.
Brian Turner
War is organized murder and nothing else
Harry Patch
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on rowThat mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns belowWe are the DeadShort days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow/Loved, and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders FieldsTake up our quarrel with the foeTo you from failing hands we throw The torchbe yours to hold it highIf ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep/though poppies growIn Flanders Fields
John McCrae
When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead"When you see millions of the mouthless deadAcross your dreams in pale battalions go,Say not soft things as other men have said,That you'll remember. For you need not so.Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they knowIt is not curses heaped on each gashed head?Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,"Yet many a better one has died before."Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great death has made all his for evermore.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
I have a rendezvous with death... I will not fail that rendezvous
Alan Seeger
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.
Alistair Urquhart
The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.
Ernst Jünger
It is a great priviledge to hear from the mouth of an initiate what struggles we are ensnared in and what the meaning is of the sacrifices we are required to make before veiled images. Even if we should hear something evil, it would still be a blessing to see our task as something beyond a senseless cycle of recurrence.
Ernst Jünger
Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.
Ernst Jünger
Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and service on the part of the members. In a wider national sphere, the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self‑sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse.
John Bagot Glubb
A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
Only victors have stories to tell,we the vanquished were then thought ofas cowards and weaklings whose memoriesand fears should not be remembered.
Guy Sajer
Stain not the glory of your worthy ancestors, but like them resolve never to part with your birthright; be wise in your deliberations, and determined in your exertions for the preservation of your liberties. Fllow not the dictates of passion, but enlist yourselves under the sacred banner of reason; use every method in your power to secure your rights.
Joseph Warren
And it is undeniably true that the greatest and most important right of a British subject is that he shall be governed by no laws but those to which he, either in person or by his representatives, hath given his consent; and this, I will venture to assert, is the great basis of British freedom; it is interwoven with the Constitution, and whenever this is lost, the Constitution must be destroyed.
Joseph Warren
I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.
P.B.S. Pinchback
The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender nor retreat.
William Travis
All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.
Siegfried Sassoon
The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.
Siegfried Sassoon
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.
Siegfried Sassoon
God’s justice in the one, and his goodness in the other, is exercised for evermore, as the everlasting subjects of his reward and punishment.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage.
Richard Lovelace
I'm obsessed with trying to recount events as accurately and honestly as possible, but in practice the only thing I'm really any good at is telling you how I feel.
Jason Christopher Hartley
...men unite against none so readily as against those whom theysee attempting to rule over them.
Xenophon
I will always hate war, but will be forever proud of mine.
David Bellavia
The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
William Francis Butler
That man is formed for social life is an observation which, upon our first inquiry, presents itself immediately to our view, and our reason approves that wise and generous principle which actuated the first founders of civil government, an institution which hat its origin in the weakness of individuals, and hath for its end the strength and security of all; and so long as the means of effecting this important end are thoroughly known and religiously attended to government is one of the richest blessings to mankind, and ought to be held in the highest veneration
Joseph Warren
Anger is defined by philosophers as a long-standing and sometimes incurable mental ulcer, usually arising from weakness of intellect. In support of this they argue with some plausibility that this tendency occurs more in invalids than in the healthy, more in women than in men, more in the old than the young, more in those in trouble than in the prosperous.
Ammianus Marcellinus
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
Enoch Powell
Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.
Enoch Powell
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.
Siegfried Sassoon
The place was silent and - aware.
P.C. Wren
Evan no longer tells people I fight bad guys for a living. When asked, he tells his friends that his dad talks on the phone a lot and vacuums on occasion.
David Bellavia
Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]
Ernst Jünger
The anarch's study of the history of the caesars has more of a theoretical significance for him - it offers a sampling of how far rulers can go. In practice, self-discipline is the only kind of rule that suits the anarch. He, too, can kill anyone (this is deeply immured in the crypt of his consciousness) and, above all, extinguish himself if he finds himself inadequate.
Ernst Jünger
Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things!Grow rich in that which never taketh rust:Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy mightTo that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light,That doth both shine, and give us sight to see.
Philip Sidney
Prognoses which have been made contend that our technology will terminate in pure necromancy. If so, everything we now experience would be only a departure and mechanics would become refined to a degree that would no longer require any crude embodiment. Lights, words, yes even thoughts would be sufficient. (1957)
Ernst Jünger
A memory is lodged in the mind but a feeling inhabits the whole body
Denis Avey
Ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises for a second his eyes to Heaven, and closes them for ever; but, during that rapid second that is granted to him, from all the quarters of Heaven, and from the outer limits of the Universe, a consoling ray darts from each world and meets his eyes, to announce to him that some connection exists between him and infinity, and that even he is linked to eternity.
Xavier de Maistre
Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.
William Clark
The life of nations no less than that of men is lived largely in the imagination.
Enoch Powell
Over the years I've really believed when you think you're in danger, you are probably not and when you have no idea, you probably are.
Rodney Cocks
Remembering is not enough, if it simply hardens hate. Sometimes the hating has to stop.
Eric Lomax
Stella, the only planet of my light,Light of my life, and life of my desire,Chief good, whereto my hope doth only aspire,World of my wealth, and heav'n of my delight:Why dost thou spend the treasure of thy sprite,With voice more fit to wed Amphion's lyre,Seeking to quench in me the noble fireFed by thy worth, and kindled by thy sight?And all in vain, for while thy breath most sweet,With choicest words, thy words with reasons rare,Thy reasons firmly set on Virtue's feet,Labor to kill in me this killing care:Oh, think I then, what paradise of joyIt is, so fair a Virtue to enjoy.
Philip Sidney
Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.
Philip Sidney
When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of technology, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side. Then we realize we that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone - a call of destiny.This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can only be impressed by large quantities - chiefly when they are in motion - and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan.
Ernst Jünger
A general is a specialist insofar as he has master his craft. Beyond that and outside the arbitrary pro and con, he keeps a third possibility intact and in reserve: his own substance. He knows more than what he embodies and teaches, has other skills along with the ones for which he is paid. He keeps all that to himself; it is his property. It is set aside for his leisure, his soliloquies, his nights. At a propitious moment, he will put it into action, tear off his mask. So far, he has been racing well; within sight is the finish line, his final reserves start pouring in. Fate challenges him; he responds. The dream, even in an erotic encounter, comes true. But causally, even here; every goal is a transition for him. The bow should snap rather than aiming the arrow at a finite target.
Ernst Jünger
You should be able to strip a man naked and throw him out with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of a year he should own a business and have money in the bank.
Rick Rescorla
Law and custom are becoming the subjects of a new field of learning. The anarch endeavors to judge them ethnographically, historically, and also – I will probably come back to this – morally. The State will be generally satisfied with him; it will scarcely notice him In this respect he bears a certain resemblance to the criminal – say, the master spy – whose gifts are concealed behind a run-of-the-mill occupation.
Ernst Jünger
A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them.‘It is strange,’ Sir William Parry wrote when describing the igloos on Winter Island, ‘it is strange to think that all these measure are taken against the cold – and in houses of ice.
Ernst Jünger
I begin with the respect that the anarch shows towards the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: ‘to look back, to think over, to take into account.’ These are traffic rules. The anarchist resembles a pedestrian who refuses to acknowledge them and is promptly run down. Even a passport check is disastrous for him. ‘I never saw a cheerful end,’ as far back as I can look into history. In contrast, I would assume that men who were blessed with happiness – Sulla, for example – were anarchs in disguise.
Ernst Jünger