Military Quotes

Tom's Navy SEAL team nicknamed him 'Tailspin', especially after sustaining his knee injury, but Joe likes to call him his 'Lucky Charm' -- saved his tail too many times to count.

~ L.a. Kragie

A soldier is not always just a soldier.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Foreshadowing: Was my challenging Allah to unleash the full weight of his fury upon us, with dark clouds looming in the distance.

~ Adam Fenner

As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.

~ Scott Farris

The only easy day was yesterday!

~ D.j. Molles

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

~ George Orwell

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

~ Ishmael Beah

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

~ Philip Caputo

They bright whiten all this sepulchre with powdered chloride of lime. It's a perfectly sanitary war.

~ David Jones

But as much as this is a soldier's reason d'etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about 'killing'. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by any number of other euphemisms. In precise and technical military parlance, reflecting the ever more precise and technically removed means of killing, the 'enemy' becomes the 'target'. But for the soldiers who personally 'engage' these 'targets', these objects are colloquially 'slotted', 'dropped', 'hit', 'fragged', 'sawn in half', 'smashed' or just plain 'shot'.Then the soldier will have achieved the noun of a 'kill'. The author's supposition is that such words are used by the soldier in combat as an attempt to mentally dissociate himself from the reality of his actions, so he can continue to operate as a soldier - and perhaps, when all is finally said and done, as a human being back home.

~ Jake Wood

The contention that a standing army and navy is the best security of peace is about as logical as the claim that the most peaceful citizen is he who goes about heavily armed. The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained.

~ Emma Goldman

...and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of.

~ David Jones

For they were unseasoned, nor inured, not knowing this to be much less than the beginning of sorrow.

~ David Jones

He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.

~ David Jones

This is our foxhole, and in foxholes, sometimes faith is all you've got.

~ James R. Hannibal

Federal Officer: The arms piled on the ground were not worth 10 cents a ton.

~ Clint Johnson

I'll have you understand the United States has got the best navy in the world.Well, . . . why, then, do we need a bigger navy?We've got to have a still bigger navy because we're the richest nation on earth.

~ Clyde Brion Davis

This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which they function. The U.S. Army has a robust process to guide change in its combat developments community. Change is also present in the business world, as industry seeks a competitive advantage in order to survive and prosper. The present transformation initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense seek to maintain the U.S. dominance in military capability in the world and to exploit the opportunities afforded by new technologies and concepts of organization and warfare that use those technologies.The future of military requirements remain a challenge to define. The transformation process tries to define that future and the capabilities needed in order to maintain the security of the United States. Yet enemies of the United States and its allies also seek to predict and mold this future to their advantage. The rise of Islamic fundamentalists or radicalism has changed the global security environment. Western nations must prepare to defeat this threat that is not really new but has risen to new levels of ferocity and lethality.Regardless of the changes in technology, organizational and operational concepts, and external or internal threats, people remain a constant as the crucial element in war. People make decisions to use military and other elements of national power to impose the will of a nation on another group or nations. People also comprise the military services and man the component systems within the services. Any study of war and warfare must address the impact that people make on the conduct of war and the effects of war on people. The political process always includes people. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of that political process. Leaders who make a decision to fight and those who lead those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into battle must not forget that people implement those decisions and are the object of any offense or defense. Protecting the citizens of the United States is why the nation maintains military forces.

~ John M. House

As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm.

~ David Jones

But how intolerable bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word.

~ David Jones

As a ground-combat force approaches the deadly zone and moves within range of the enemy’s rifles, mortars, and machine guns, the dynamics of war become more art than science. Intangibles such as training, confidence, leadership, and cohesion provide more secure mantle of protection than the possession of superior equipment.”There is as much folklore as science in the accounts of maneuver units that do exceptionally well in close combat. Empirical and anecdotal evidence gathered from combat studies of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam has shown conclusively that elite maneuver units, carefully selected and trained, not only perform better in combat but do so with many fewer casualties from all sources of combat incapacitation (for example, from disease and combat fatigue). Such units fight so effectively because they are composed of soldiers of exceptionally quality – better trained and better led as well as coalesced through long-term association that builds familiarity and mutual trust. The difference between carefully trained and led units and those of lesser quality is dramatic.

~ Robert H. Scales Jr.

In my experience, the ex-military guys came in two types. The first grew long hair, sprouted beards, and indulged in all the things they hadn't been able do while they'd been in the armed forces. The second did their best to pretend they never got out.

~ Ilona Andrews

Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.

~ Alfred Tennyson

Conviction rates in the military are pathetic, with most offenders going free AND THERE IS NO RECOURSE FOR APPEAL! The military believes the Emperor has his clothes on, even when they are down around his ankles and he is coming in the woman's window with a knife! Military juries give low sentences or clear offender's altogether. Women can be heard to say “it's not just me” over and over. Men may get an Article 15, which is just a slap on the wrist, and doesn't even follow them in their career. This is hardly a deterrent. The perpetrator frequently stays in place to continue to intimidate their female victims, who are then treated like mental cases, who need to be discharged. Women find the tables turned, letters in their files, trumped up Women find the tables turned, letters in their files, trumped up charges; isolation and transfer are common, as are court ordered psychiatric referrals that label the women as lying or incompatible with military service because they are “Borderline Personality Disorders” or mentally unbalanced. I attended many of these women, after they were discharged, or were wives of abusers, from xxx Air Force Base, when I was a psychotherapist working in the private sector. That was always their diagnosis, yet retesting tended to show something different after stabilization, like PTSD.

~ Diane Chamberlain

There is strong. There is Army Strong. And then there is Army Wife Strong.

~ Aditi Mathur Kumar

Everyday US Marines make possible the impossible and then go about their business like it's just the way things are supposed to be.

~ Mark W. Boyer

The principle of compulsory service, embodied in the system of conscription, lias been the means by which modem dictators and military gangs have shackled their people after a coup d'état, and bound them to their own aggressive purposes. In view of the great service that conscription has rendered to tyranny and war, it is fundamentally shortsighted for any liberty-loving and peace-desiring peoples to maintain it as an imagined safeguard, lest they become the victims of the monster they have helped to preserve.

~ B.h. Liddell Hart

Apparently officers are not ‘men’. Officers are ‘officers’.

~ Aditi Mathur Kumar

Every marriage that ends in divorce; every serviceman who kills him- or herself; and every time a young warrior experience substance abuse issues, we witness a casualty of war.

~ Jay Kopelman

During the war some of the country’s sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

~ Sara Sheridan

If you have to fight old enemies, you should do it with your own old soldiers.

~ Marius C.

There’s nothing like a military man, even out of uniform.

~ Sara Sheridan

An army of sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a sheep.

~ Alexander The Great

He who is ready to die for his country is a fool. For he didn’t choose where he was born, and where he was born didn’t choose him.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

During Basic, sometimes you're so tired you can't even get up to piss. You're pushed beyond whatever limits you had set for yourself. You realize that your body can do things that you never imagined. But there are times when you don't think you can go on, and that's when your brother is there to lift you up and push you forward. He yells encouragement when the drill sergeant's yelling obscenities. You know that if you're ever caught by the enemy, your brothers will never stop looking for you. If you're hurt they'll help heal you. The Corps is a unit of many, not one, but dozens, thousands even, who have your back. You can smite one Marine, but a thousand will rose up to avenge him.

~ Jen Frederick

Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental.As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Permission to shoot the fucker in the face when it comes over the rim?

~ J. Fally

He said: 'You don't understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.

~ Amitav Ghosh

The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss a chance to publicly praise the troops and honor those who had lost their lives in service.Some of the tributes would be sincere and heartfelt, and some less so. But participating in the event, vowing undying support for the U.S. military, was an absolute must to maintain political viability. It was okay to vote to cut funds for veterans' healthcare, but don't dare miss a chance to jump on the Memorial Day bandwagon.

~ David Rosenfelt

There are no veterans, only survivors.

~ Rick H. Blase