War Quotes

July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.

~ Markus Zusak

Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

~ Alan W. Watts

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... 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.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

They say this war is a cloud over the land! But they make the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, ‘Shit, it’s raining!

~ Charles Frazier

Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess.

~ Catherine Gilbert Murdock

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

~ Pat Barker

Are you a communist?No I am an anti-fascistFor a long time?Since I have understood fascism.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.

~ Robert Buettner

No soldier ever really survives a war.

~ Audie Murphy

I love that name. A country named Chad. Sounds like somebody who lived next door to the Brady Bunch. But if Chad actually lived next door to the Bradys, Greg would be roasting over a slow fire and Marcia would be standing naked on an auction block, because Chad is one of the hungriest, craziest, most desperate places on the planet.

~ Gary Brecher

Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you're at war.

~ David Levithan

Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

~ David Kenyon Webster

So fair a victor, how can I help but be conquered.

~ Alice Borchardt

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I'm a fucking coward.Maybe. Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.

~ Joe Abercrombie

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.

~ Chris Hedges

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.

~ Laini Taylor

The things men did or felt they had to do.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.

~ Michael Scott

I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.

~ Willie Nelson

What is war?' I asked.Oh, it's a messy, stupid business,' he said, 'Two sides wave flags and beat drums and shoot one another dead. It always begins this way, making speeches, talking about rights, and all that sort of thing.'But what is it for? What do they get out of it?'I don't know,' he said. 'To tell you the truth, I don't think they know themselves.

~ Hugh Lofting

Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses theinitiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defendmakes them timorous.

~ Steven Pressfield

The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages. ...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam. What the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad.

~ Howard Zinn

Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

~ Sun Tzu

Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.

~ Jillian Lauren

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

~ David Mitchell

He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story

~ Ted Dekker

The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.

~ Jared Diamond

Acknowledgements! My thanks to HollywoodWhen you showed me John RamboStitching up his arm with no anaestheticAnd giving them “a war they won’t believe”I knew then my calling, the job for meThanks also to the recruitment advertsFor showing me soldiers whizzing around on skisAnd for sending sergeants to our schoolTo tell us of the laughs, the great food, the payThe camaraderieI am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debtYou paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimageOne year basking in the Garden of Eden(I haven’t quite left yet)Thanks to Mum and thanks to DadFuck it,Thanks to every parentFlushing with pride for their brave young ladsBuying young siblings toy guns and toy tanksWaiting at the airportWaving their flags

~ Danny Martin

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

~ Noam Chomsky

I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.

~ Derek Landy

War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.

~ Laini Taylor

It's always good to be underestimated.

~ Melissa De La Cruz

I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.

~ Montesquieu

If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst. [One may know the condition of a whole army from the behavior of a single man.]

~ Sun Tzu

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

~ Rebecca West

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

~ Mark Lawrence

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.

~ Diana Gabaldon

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

~ Margaret Mead