War Quotes

The Sniper must not be susceptible to emotions such as anxiety and remorse

~ Craig Roberts

We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down.

~ George Macdonald Fraser

Sometimes, war can make a change.Sometimes, change can ignite a war.

~ Toba Beta

Maybe we’ll evolve to a point where fear as an experience is no longer instinctual, but rather an emotion we use to enrich our understanding of why our human ancestors killed each other when they could have loved each other. One day we’ll be holding hands instead of grudges; we’ll eliminate our territorial circuits and know what love is. One day we’ll be holding hands instead of M-16s.

~ Oliver Hart

Max had to think about these new developments. He hadn't liked getting hit by a rock--his stomach still ached from then rock Judith had thrown--but then again, when his team had used rocks on Alexander, it had caused him to surrender. Now the Bad Guys only had three soldiers left, which would make victory for Max's team more likely. So now it made perfect sense. He was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use all the weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them.

~ Dave Eggers

Place yourself... You are either a.) part of the problem; b.) part of the solution, or c.) part of the landscape.

~ James D. Sass

All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.

~ William Trevor

Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers.

~ Holly Lisle

Smartass Disciple: Master, you should teach people not to do war to each other.Master of Stupidity: I should teach people how to win their minds of their wars.

~ Toba Beta

Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.

~ Greg Mortenson

Once and for allthe idea of glorious victorieswon by the glorious armymust be wiped outNeither side is gloriousOn either side they're just frightened men messing their pantsand they all want the same thingNot to lie under the earthbut to walk upon itwithout crutches(Roux, act 1, scene 19)

~ Peter Weiss

* Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.

~ Pindar

Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.

~ George Orwell

Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive.

~ Susan Sontag

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

~ Jim Fergus

We pass and leave you lying. No need for rhetoric, for funeral music, for melancholy bugle-calls. No need for tears now, no need for regret.We took our risk with you; you died and we live. We take your noble gift, salute for the last time those lines of pitiable crosses, those solitary mounds, those unknown graves, and turn to live our lives out as we may.Which of us were fortunate--who can tell? For you there is silence and cold twilight drooping in awful desolation over those motionless lands. For us sunlight and the sound of women's voices, song and hope and laughter, despair, gaiety, love--life.Lost terrible silent comrades, we, who might have died, salute you.

~ Richard Aldington

...you never knows where a spark may drop and a fire begin to run.

~ George Manville Fenn

it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if— as the war ends, or at least starts to end— if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn‘t why were told that we were going there— Aren‘t we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren‘t we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren‘t we sort of letting them get away with it?

~ Rachel Maddow

Melodramas of moral courage provide satisfaction through the comforting fantasy that our own character would hold steady under the most extreme pressure of dreadful events. [But we must face] the painful awareness that in all likelyhood one's own character would not have stood firm.

~ Jonathan Shay

If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked.

~ James Webb

The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl--not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell--and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging h

~ Nick Harkaway

I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life

~ George Armstrong Custer

You don`t have to do anything. Why worry? It`s all god`s plan anyway. Just love everyone and believe. Be a limp-wristed wimp and recruit others to be the same. But, give unto Caesar that which is Caesar`s. When Caesar says drop bombs on christian babies in Berlin, or Muslim babies in Iraq, it`s okay. When Caesar says open your borders to tens of millions of dark immigrants, or to bus your children to jungle neighborhoods, or to accept legalized pornography an the abortion murder of babies, then it is Caesar`s responsibility, not the Christian`s. So don`t concern yourselves.

~ Frazier Glenn Miller

A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.

~ Tim O'brien

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Sooner or later every war of trade becomes a war of blood.

~ Eugene V. Debs

[W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form.

~ John Keegan

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

~ Arundhati Roy

Seeing the enemy as human. A general's ultimate nightmare.

~ Sabaa Tahir

What did I want? I wanted the war to be over so I could ask her out.

~ Ruta Sepetys

I told you once before that there were two times for making big money, one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up. Remember my words. Perhaps they may be of use to you some day. (Rhett Butler)

~ Margaret Mitchell

I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.

~ Noam Chomsky

Insurgence and all forms of evil in a society doesn't describes her as a failure, but vividly shows a lack of love for one another.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Have you ever dealt with people who have lost everything in just an hour? In the morning you leave the house where your wife, your children, your parents live. You return and you find a smoking pit. Then something happens to you - to a certain extent you stop being human. You do not need any glory, money anymore; revenge becomes your only joy. And because you no longer cling to life, death avoids you, the bullets fly past. You become a wolf.

~ Russian General Aleksander Lebed

There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.

~ Louis L'amour

Shit! I shouted at him. Now listen, my friend. The youth have no role. They have no jobs. They have no money. They are not in power and they do not make decisions. If there is going to be a war, they will be dumped into the army. And they will be killed like young men everywhere have been killed - whether or not they believe in the war. Having no role is their role.

~ F. Sionil José

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.

~ Jimmy Carter

But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll be a reckoning. Who knows?

~ Harry S. Truman

The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.

~ Philippa Gregory