War Quotes - Page 18

Bullets do not discriminate. They are equal-opportunity projectiles.

And the Great Adventure - the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys - consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had hardly known. No wonder they broke down.

When you fear nothing, you have nothing to fear

War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.

The leave zipped right by. We were so terrifically glad to be back to our own little section of the trench, with all its happy memories, that we wouldn’t have traded places with anybody. The lazy bastard who’d filled in while we were away hadn’t managed to nibble away so much as an inch of garden soil in the direction of Berlin.We found out that Brugnon hadn’t come back from leave. He’d hanged himself in the stairwell of his building, on rue des Gâtines. He left a note to say he couldn’t take it any more and asked us to count him out. We accepted it… Who were we to judge?

Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

Gabriel Chevallier

If you do not want to stop the wheels of progress; if you do not want to go back to the Dark Ages; if you do not want to live again under tyranny, then you must guard your liberty, and you must not let the church get control of your government. If you do, you will lose the greatest legacy ever bequeathed to the human race—intellectual freedom.Now let me tell you another thing. If all the energy and wealth wasted upon religion—in all of its varied forms—had been spent to understand life and its problems, we would today be living under conditions that would seem almost like Utopia. Most of our social and domestic problems would have been solved, and equally as important, our understanding and relations with the other peoples of the world would have, by now, brought about universal peace.Man would have a better understanding of his motives and actions, and would have learned to curb his primitive instincts for revenge and retaliation. He would, by now, know that wars of hate, aggression, and aggrandizement are only productive of more hate and more human suffering.The enlightened and completely emancipated man from the fears of a God and the dogma of hate and revenge would make him a brother to his fellow man.He would devote his energies to discoveries and inventions, which theology previously condemned as a defiance of God, but which have proved so beneficial to him. He would no longer be a slave to a God and live in cringing fear!

We know—more from the faces immortalized on a handful of photographs than from the words of survivors—that the women and men who experienced that moment in Hiroshima believed they had encountered the beginning of the end of the world. There will never be enough future to prove them wrong.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

Aleksandar Hemon

Victory will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can survive the most.

It doesn't matter who started it or what it's really about...war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we're not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion's share of the suffering.

Brian K. Vaughan

A human being can only take so much when their basic rights as a citizen of the earth are being denied to them – or sold at a high cost.

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet.Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them.Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet?In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing.Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room.And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.

When men reject reason, they have no means left for dealing with one another — except brute, physical force.

Ayn Rand

Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn’t really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition. I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I’d awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life.

A part of me genuinely wanted to be the worst because I was so sick of everyone fighting to be the best.

The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Knowledge of self ought to be the great project of our lives. Knowing ourselves we will know others. Only by knowing ourselves can we begin to undo the madness we unleash on the world in our wars, our destruction of the environment, our divisions, our desire to dominate others, the poverty we create and exploit. Only through self-knowledge can we reverse the damage we do with all the worldly knowledge we have, which has been only a higher ignorance.

Ben Okri

We would soon be on our way to war, where mercy is unwise and kindness has no place.

A piece of benevolence, a shard of good will is sometimes all that is needed to raise a truly loyal army.

As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

Eugene B. Sledge

In the world of so-called villains, what we need is not another hero. What we need is to stop the influx of people who dress themselves as menaces and proceed to harm others.

Vironika Tugaleva

Modern sovereignty, whether expressed through killing in battle or the torture of suspects, brings together the desire to build up and the desire to destroy, to let Aid Agencies offer charity (in its original meaning of "love") while the military offers death. The two are intrinsically connected.

Let the world feel your compassion: Help save kidnapped Yazidi females!

Those who’ve left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies’ wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand.

Even if it's very late at night. Someone's always awake in the world. But of all those things you could think up for people to be doing, I think going hungry would have to be your safest bet. Going hungry, pushing each other around, leaving bombs, breaking promises, leaving nothing. It happens far away all the time. But sometimes near. We're almost two kinds of people. Some of us see it on the evening news or read about it in the morning paper. And some of us get hurt. But, you know we all get hurt. Because even if you live in a very nice house like I do, sooner or later the lies and the fires have got to burn you.

Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and attempted to dismantle the corrupt societal traditions of their time. Yet their teachings, like most things in human society, have been distorted and co-opted by the confused and power-hungry patriarchal tradition. What were wonce the creation myths of ancient cultures, have become doctrines of oppression. More blood has been spilled and more people oppressed in the name of religion than for any other reason in history.

For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!

If I were a magician who could make things possible, then pictures could talk while we painted them. If I were a magaician who could make things possible, then houses could keep their promises. And they would have to promise not to lose their roofs or go up in flames. If I were a magician who could make things possible, the scars made in them by bullet holes would close up again over the years.

Saša Stanišić

Master of magic, god of war, Odin wanders alone.

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.

The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he's with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit.

Michael Ondaatje

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

William Shakespeare

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war, Daniel. We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.p. 428

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I've worked hard to remember it...The problem is I'm not sure what's real memory and what's my brain filling in details, like a guy whose heart stops and he thinks he sees a bright light. Except I'm sure of my bright light.

Phil Klay

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.

May the ears of Canada never grow deaf to the plea of widows and orphans and our crippled men for care and support. May the eyes of Canada never be blind to that glorious light which shines upon our young national life from the deeds of those "who counted not their lives dear unto themselves," and may the lips of Canada never be dumb to tell to future generations the tales of heroism which will kindle the imagination and fire the patriotism of children that are yet unborn.

Frederick George Scott

War ends at the moment when peace permanently wins out. Not when the articles of surrender are signed or the last shot is fired, but when the last shout of a sidewalk battle fades, when the next generation starts to wonder whether the whole thing ever really happened. World War II ended as war always ends -- by trailing off into nothingness and doubt. Its final monument has never been seen by mortal eyes. It's a phantom image at the edge of a rumor: an unmarked grave in the depths of the South American jungle where a weird and decrepit old man, half forgotten by the world, at last entered the lists of oblivion.

When time furtively slips like sand through the fingers and our memory becomes tired and lazy, we recognize we are at war. We are at war with forgetfulness. ("The past was her best friend" )

Erik Pevernagie

He who writes is the martyr, seen through the eyes of the unassuming doll.

A.K. Kuykendall

I will love to be called a foolish man of peace, than to be named a wise man of war. Show me your weapons of war and I will show you my Bible of peace!

Israelmore Ayivor

The little I have, I share with you; the little you have, you also share with me. Together we all have a full share of everything. Share with me your Love as I share with you my Peace; together we have full share of Unity!

Israelmore Ayivor

Be quick to resolve conflicts before they mature to become wars. The energetic crocodile was once a delicate egg!

Israelmore Ayivor

The most ignorant and wasted youthful generation is the very one that the older generation uses to create social conflicts to their own youthful detriment!

Israelmore Ayivor

The greatest tragedy to ever happen to a nation is not the incidences of war or terrorism. It's when more bookshops close down and more drinking bars are opened to replace them!

Israelmore Ayivor

At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.

Sun Tzu

Ground on which we can only be saved from destruction by fighting without delay, is desperate ground.

Sun Tzu

When an invading force crosses a river in its onward march, do not advance to meet it in mid-stream. It will be best to let half the army get across, and then deliver your attack.

Sun Tzu

Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.

Sun Tzu

Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive.

Sun Tzu

If his forces are united, separate them.

Sun Tzu

who does not know the evils of war cannot appreciate its benefits

Sun Tzu

do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat

Sun Tzu

Conceal your dispositions, and your condition will remain secret, which leads to victory; show your dispositions, and your condition will become patent, which leads to defeat.

Sun Tzu

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

Sun Tzu

These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.

Sun Tzu

Previous 1 … 16 17 18 19 20 … 71 Next