War Quotes

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!

~ Jack Kornfield

Are we entirely ready, sir? said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means We are not entirely ready, sir.We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.

~ Terry Pratchett

I've learned that from a war ignited by revenge, nothing can be born, but sorrow. - Aladdin

~ Shinobu Ohtaka

War is just demographics in a hurry.

~ Gary Brecher

... We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone, and alone we must see it through.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.

~ Anonymous

Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip.

~ Tad Williams

A cop's JOB is to violently enforce upon the rest of us whatever arbitrary bullshit the political parasites declare to be law. It is, therefore, impossible to be a law enforcer and behave morally, for the same reason one can't be a moral car-jacker.

~ Larken Rose

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

~ David Foster Wallace

I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

War, in some ways, is merciful to men. It makes them heroes if they are the victors. If they are the vanquished - they do not live to see their homes taken, their wives widowed. But if you are a woman - you must live through defeat...

~ Samhita Arni

There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war, there is only just and unjust war.

~ Victor Hugo

John Smith: Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.

~ Paul Cornell

Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.

~ Joseph Heller

Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.

~ Sebastian Junger

The war which is comingIs not the first one. There wereOther wars before it.When the last one came to an endThere were conquerors and conquered.Among the conquered the common peopleStarved. Among the conquerorsThe common people starved too.

~ Bertolt Brecht

There are certain verses in the Quran which convey injunctions similar to the following: 'Kill them wherever you find them.' (2:191) Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is total untrue. Such verses relate in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. (pp. 42-43)

~ Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

This is stupid.Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.

~ Joe Abercrombie

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.

~ William C. Westmoreland

The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.

~ John Fowles

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

~ Sebastian Junger

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

~ Albert Camus

You cannot choose your battlefield,God does that for you;But you can plant a standardWhere a standard never

~ Nathalia Crane

When you are dealing with an invisible enemy,use most resources as shield, and a bit as a bait.

~ Toba Beta

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)

~ Sebastian Junger

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed God knows which was right.

~ Carl Sandburg

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

Tracer lighting up the sky.It's another families' turn to die.A child afraid to even cry out says,He has been here.And I see no bravery,No bravery in your eyes anymore.Only sadness.

~ James Blunt

Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man - and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. So they're even more afraid than we are! he thought. So that's all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I'd kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!

~ Leo Tolstoy

-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!

~ Joseph Heller

What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.

~ Grant Morrison

So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.

~ Joe Abercrombie

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?

~ Noam Chomsky

War is the greatest evil Satan has invented to corrupt our hearts and souls. We should honor our soldiers, but we should never honor war.

~ Dean Hughes

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

~ Patrick Ness

I do not say that there is no glory to be gained [in war]; but it is not personal glory. In itself, no cause was ever more glorious than that of men who struggle, not to conquer territory, not to gather spoil, not to gratify ambition, but for freedom, for religion, for hearth and home, and to revenge the countless atrocities inflicted upon them by their oppressors.

~ G.a. Henty

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, he is our bloody tyrant. In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

~ Samuel P. Huntington

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

~ Scott Westerfeld