War Quotes - Page 8

But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?""Yes, I am fond of history.""I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome.

Jane Austen

But as I peeked at my brother's inert body....I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being sent war? Which sex was really thought to be expendable.

Jeffrey Eugenides

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

Paul Fussell

I am a Christian, but my time in Iraq has convinced me that God doesn't want to hear from me anymore. I've done things that He can never forgive. I've done them consciously. I've made decisions I must live with for years to come. I am not a victim. In each instance, I heard my conscience call for restraint, I told it to shut the fuck up and let me handle my business. All the sins I've committed, I've done with one objective: to keep my men alive.

David Bellavia

It is the postscript to the war that offers the most revelatory and startling commentary on Dutugemunu's life. Despite his newfound wealth and his peactime luxuries, Dutugemunu wanders gloomily about his palace, too often remembering the carnage he wrought on the battlefield and worried over the deep karmic deficits he has incurred. The elders of the Sangha, the Buddhist clergy, notice this and send a delegation of eight monks to minister to his anguish. 'In truth, venerable sirs,' Dutugemunu tells the monks when they arrive, 'how can there be comfort to me in that I caused the destruction of a great army of myriads of men?''There is no hindrance on the way to heaven because of your acts,' one of the monks assures his king. Slaughtering Tamils is no moral mistake. Only the equivalent of one and a half men died at Dutugemunu's hands, according to the Sangha's official arithmetic, because the Tamils 'were heretical and evil and dies as though they were animals. You will make the Buddha's faith shine in many ways. Therefore, Lord of Men, cast away your mental confusion.'Being thus exhorted, the great king was comforted; his kill rate would never disturb him again. He does, however, recall that, once upon a breakfast, he ate a red-pepper pod without consciously setting aside a portion of it for the Sangha, as was the royal practice. 'For this,' he decides, 'penance must be done by me.' A hierarchy of sin springs into being, in which dishonouring the Sangha by denying it a due share of a red-pepper pod counts as a graver transgression, worthier of penance, than massacring thousands of Tamils on the battlefield.

Samanth Subramanian

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

Sara Sheridan

So the whole war is beause we can't talk to each other.

Orson Scott Card

In recent years, academics, policy-makers, and experts have raised the question of the applicability of peacetime environmental law in times of armed conflict.

Widad Akreyi

Across the world, the lack of accountability for the harm to the environment and public health caused by conflict and military activities undermines global efforts to help fragile countries recover from armed conflicts

Widad Akreyi

Toxic remnants of war represent a profound challenge for the protection of public health and the restoration of the environment in countries affected by conflict.

Widad Akreyi

Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Some people would rather that you die for their beliefs than that they re-examine those beliefs.

Jay Lake

Dear Beloved woman,Time… so much time has passed since my love wrote his last words for me.And yet I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember writing back and for the first time since I had left home I told my love what kind of darkness surrounded me here. I forgot all the sweet things my father had said to my mother when he was away. I forgot how they got her through all those long and lonely nights.

Talon P.S.

Once, my enemies were those I could seeNow the devil lies deep within meBut angels still nudge me, whispering follies of sinThis war is mine, and mine alone, to win.

Sarah Brownlee

It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No.

David Finkel

Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies.

Suzy Kassem

The use of rape and enslavement as weapons of war MUST END!

Widad Akreyi

We are determined to answer evil with GOOD, slavery with FREEDOM, rape with hope!We are against slavery, rape, beheading, torture, violations of human rights, corruption and misuse of religion!

Widad Akreyi

I will follow anyone... And tell everyone...How grateful I am...To the Western nations.

Widad Akreyi

We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.

Irène Némirovsky

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?

Laini Taylor

You know,” Taniel said, “we could have kept firing after they sounded the retreat. Would have wiped out thousands on the mountainside. The Kez did that to us in Fatrasta a few times.”Gavril snorted angrily. “War has to have some decorum. Otherwise it’s back to the Bleakening for all of us, and Kresimir be damned.

Brian McClellan

One day a year let’s all pretendthat death is tucked up, fast asleep.That no lives meet a tragic end,no dreams are shattered on the cheap.The world’s at peace, there are no wars,we hug our friend, our former foe.No beggars die outside locked doors,all cells are empty on death row.Nobody’s stabbed, nobody’s shot,no car runs over someone’s friend.This can’t be true! – Well, maybe not.All I’m saying is: let’s pretend.

Stig Dagerman

There is a simplicity to war. Attacking is the only secret. Dare- and the world yields. How quickly they forget that all it takes to change the course of history... is the will of a single man.

Captain Price

Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

Sun Tzu

There have been ample opportunities since 1945 to show that material superiority in war is not enough if the will to fight is lacking. In Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan the balance of economic and military strength lay overwhelmingly on the side of France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, but the will to win was slowly eroded. Troops became demoralised and brutalised. Even a political solution was abandoned. In all three cases the greater power withdrew. The Second World War was an altogether different conflict, but the will to win was every bit as important - indeed it was more so. The contest was popularly perceived to be about issues of life and death of whole communities rather than for their fighting forces alone. They were issues, wrote one American observer in 1939, 'worth dying for'. If, he continued, 'the will-to-destruction triumphs, our resolution to preserve civilisation must become more implacable...our courage must mount'.Words like 'will' and 'courage' are difficult for historians to use as instruments of cold analysis. They cannot be quantified; they are elusive of definition; they are products of a moral language that is regarded sceptically today, even tainted by its association with fascist rhetoric. German and Japanese leaders believed that the spiritual strength of their soldiers and workers in some indefinable way compensate for their technical inferiority. When asked after the war why Japan lost, one senior naval officer replied that the Japanese 'were short on spirit, the military spirit was weak...' and put this explanation ahead of any material cause. Within Germany, belief that spiritual strength or willpower was worth more than generous supplies of weapons was not confined to Hitler by any means, though it was certainly a central element in the way he looked at the world.The irony was that Hitler's ambition to impose his will on others did perhaps more than anything to ensure that his enemies' will to win burned brighter still. The Allies were united by nothing so much as a fundamental desire to smash Hitlerism and Japanese militarism and to use any weapon to achieve it. The primal drive for victory at all costs nourished Allied fighting power and assuaged the thirst for vengeance. They fought not only because the sum of their resources added up to victory, but because they wanted to win and were certain that their cause was just.The Allies won the Second World War because they turned their economic strength into effective fighting power, and turned the moral energies of their people into an effective will to win. The mobilisation of national resources in this broad sense never worked perfectly, but worked well enough to prevail. Materially rich, but divided, demoralised, and poorly led, the Allied coalition would have lost the war, however exaggerated Axis ambitions, however flawed their moral outlook. The war made exceptional demands on the Allied peoples. Half a century later the level of cruelty, destruction and sacrifice that it engendered is hard to comprehend, let alone recapture. Fifty years of security and prosperity have opened up a gulf between our own age and the age of crisis and violence that propelled the world into war. Though from today's perspective Allied victory might seem somehow inevitable, the conflict was poised on a knife-edge in the middle years of the war. This period must surely rank as the most significant turning point in the history of the modern age.

Richard Overy

If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this.

Philippa Gregory

…If one who slays one is a murderer then he who slays a thousand is not a hero,' said Lalu.- Pg. #112, Across the Black Waters.

Mullk Raj Anand

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth

Anthony Doerr

If and when our civilization comes to ruin, the destructive agent will be Science; man's knowledge of science, applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies, but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.

Cicely Hamilton

Destruction makes people go away so,if you hide inside destruction,you're safe

Emma Abdullah

A house can be replaced but never a lost life.

Sarah Salem

Nuclear weapons have only been used twice, both times in the war against Japan. In each case it was used by the United States during World War II. The first was used on August 6, 1945, over the Japanese city of Hiroshima and the second was dropped three days later over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two bombs resulted in the deaths of nearly a quarter million people! Recently I have heard it said that since we have the second largest arsenal of nuclear bombs, we should use them to teach North Korea a lesson and reduce tensions. Perhaps we are the ones that need to learn a lesson, so let me start by saying that since these first two bombs that have been used in anger, over two thousand tests have been conducted and that it was Russia that tested the largest bomb ever detonated. On 30 October 1961, Russia which was then the Soviet Union, detonated what was called the Tsar Bomb, a hydrogen bomb with a yield of 50 megatons which is more than 3,000 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.Are we and our leaders insane? It is only the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” of which we are a member that can reduce the spread and possible the use of nuclear weapons. Now with North Korea being a player, its effectiveness has been questioned and we are on the brink of engaging in a contest that threatens to kill 2,000,000 people in the first day. Many of these people are American military personnel and their families stationed in in Seoul, South Korea. Following any initiative on our part, including the taunts we are making, all bets will be off and there is the possibility that other countries will see the United States as the enemy that has to be stopped!

Captain Hank Bracker

You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact it's like men and women, yin and yang: you need both.

Emmanuel Carrère

Wouldn't it be nice, for once, to find a world which was at peace with itself. No matter how always those few wanted more than others. Those not satisfied with running their own lives but wishing to have power over the lives of the others. Greedy people. Greedy for wealth, or power or both.

Garry Douglas Kilworth

Wars and revolutions and battles, you see, are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Plato

CREEPOther people have written about war. About how one plane sweeps over and the whole place is ablaze in minutes. About how a young man may kill another young many with perfect legality. I prefer to write about less sudden things. About how we inch further away without even noticing. And then it's too late. Or is it? No it's not too late to say sorry, we were wrong, let's try again to get along. No, it's not too late to quit lying, halt the greed, stop polluting air earth and seas. I prefer to write about less noisy things. About change happening so gradually that one day you just accept the world as different. And you don't question because you're old, and you don't feel like making waves, and anyway, they'd say you were insane.......

Jay Woodman

You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

Michel Faber

War, money and greed that is the modern heinous Trinity, and they are inseparable these days.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

But it's fair to say that the war's [WWI] dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story -- the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

Hugh Howey

It's not unreal to me yet, though it might get that way soon. It still feels very real. And not even horrible -- the dead are just the dead. I am convinced that the living people they once were would have been proud of their protective bodies hoodwinking their murderers to save someone else. [..] But it's not civilized. There is something indecent about it -- really foully indecent. The civilized Rose-person in me, who still seems to exist beneath the layers of filth, knows this. [..] I have become so indifferent about the dead.

Elizabeth Wein

War limits the deads. It limits them to the cimetery ... (La guerre limite les morts. - Les limite au cimetière...)

Charles de Leusse

I guess the higher up on the food chain you go, the admiration isn’t just for the hungry, but for the ones that go the extra mile to take a bite.

Angela Richardson

We have our mission and we are going to complete it. So grab your straws and suck it the fuck up.

Greg Rucka

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Boys, at war, so far away, will naturally droop, both in body and mind, from lack of a particular girl’s snuggling and cuddling.

Ernest Vincent Wright

So Captain Faith conducted the prince and his mighty captains and men of war into the castle in the very heart of Mansoul. Prince Emmanuel had come home.

Ethel Barrett

There was no honor in war, less in killing, and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.

Michael Scott

Enemies,' the wizard said, 'are the price of honour.

Terry Goodkind

...Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

Tyrtaeus

Damn the wars but bless the soldier.

T.L. Moffitt

When honor and glory get your squad killed and your brothers-in-arms shoved under the rug, you stop believing in the terms.

Katherine McIntyre

So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?

Dominique Wilson

America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Jeffries and Quaker wife Amy, is also haunted by betrayal and a relentless, deadly enemy seeking to destroy him. Facing his own worst fears, Nathan is hunter and hunted in a violent world at war.

Bert J. Hubinger

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

Lee Strauss

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

Nadifa Mohamed

Even still, it wasn't over. For if a battle could be won so easily, men would soon forget its horrors and clamor for it all the more. War would come more than once or twice a generation. Easy victories would produce men who were struck dumb with their own unbelievably improbable successes. Such men wold begin to think they had devised not the superior tactic, but rather the supreme tactic at winning

Jason Born

Septimus grinned. "It's not coins I seek. I seek the power of Hercules.

Jason Born

The great Sugambrian shrugged. "I did. I supposed you've proven your worth. But no man should have to kill his own father. I should know.

Jason Born

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War Quotes - Page 8

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