War Quotes

Never confuse fighting for one's government with fighting for one's country.

~ J.adam Snyder

There was some people hurt far worst than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas.

~ Winston Groom

There was a guy next to my cot name of Dan, who had been blowed up inside a tank. He was all burnt and had tubes going in and out of him everyplace, but I never heard him holler. He talk real low and quiet, and after a day or so, him and me got to be friends. Dan came from the state of Connecticut, and he was a teacher of history when they grabbed him up and threw him into the Army. But because he was smart, they sent him to officer school and made him a lieutenant. Most of the lieutenants I know were about as simple minded as me, but Dan was different. He had his own philosophy about why we were here, which was that we were doing maybe the wrong thing for the right reasons, or vice-versa, but whatever it is, we ain't doing it right. Him being a tank officer and all, he say it ridiculous for us to be waging a war in a place where we can't hardly use our tanks on account of the land is mostly swamp or mountains. I told him about Bubba and all, and he nod his head very sadly and said there will be a lot more Bubbas to die before this thing is over.

~ Winston Groom

Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew—that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.

~ John Steinbeck

War is very cruel, a predatory jungle, and is never the true path of life.

~ Feng Nong

Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand - why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.

~ Winston Groom

Buruma is wise to recommend a balance of concessions and coordination in order to avoid war.

~ Renate Bridenthal

The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, these bodies had become poisonous.

~ Susan Griffin

Words are weapons of war.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.

~ Winston Groom

For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

~ Raymond Dean White

You can keep your paper promisesand all your worldly treasures.But you cannot buy peace of mindor escape from the headstone garden.Lyrics from Headstone Garden by the Troubled Land Band at the Independence Day celebration 12 years after the impact that destroyed civilization.

~ Raymond Dean White

There comes a time for each of us when we realize the truth about the enemy. Which is that he is not an idea, or some faceless demon. He is a man. And every man is much like ourselves.

~ Brian Van Reet

This is my war, and I don't know what side I'm on.

~ Unknown

And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.

~ Omar El Akkad

There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.

~ Chinelo Okparanta

I could have become a doctor, an engineer, a mechanic or even a car salesman but instead, I chose to be a soldier. Who was to blame? The way they glorified war back home could make anyone quit their job and join the army. The romanticized notions of being a soldier lasted till the time you had to take a life or two. After that, it all came crashing down and most of the men who signed up pulled their hair wondering why they bought into all this bullshit. We had no one to blame but ourselves. We wanted to serve this country and what better way to do it than to shoot, bomb and incinerate the enemy as our comrades fall next to us and a wife and mother somewhere hold on to a flag tightly and shed tears of loss. There was no glory in war, there was only death. These designations and medals were like magnets on a refrigerator. They didn’t mean a thing to the children who were orphaned or wives who were widowed. They didn’t mean a thing to soldiers who walked home after years on a battlefield to find their wives in bed with someone else. Yet we kept going forward, obeying every order pushed down our throats… fighting, killing.

~ Shayne Colaco

There was no right or wrong during war. The setting sun made me realize that the ones who would live to see a new day would be the ones who are victorious. As with all the history of this world, the ones who won were always right.

~ Shayne Colaco

If you create an environment of conflicts, I don’t think you will enjoy peace yourself.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

If you promote peace and progress for others, I don’t think you will have sleepless nights.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

There’s more.”“Of course there is,” Brishen said flatly. It had started badly; it turned worse and hinted at becoming ruinous.

~ Grace Draven

YOU HAVE KILLEDYOU HAVE STOLENYOU HAVE DESTROYED.DEVOURER OF LIVESDEVOURER OF SOULSYOU ARE DEFEATED!ROAR O LION OF JUDAHPROCLAIM YOUR VICTORY!CHILDREN OF ADAM BEHOLD...BEHOLD THY SALVATION.FOR GREAT IS THE DAY OF THE LORD.TURN AND FOLLOW THE CHILDAS LION LIES WITH LAMB.O SWORD BE A PLOUGHO SPEAR BE A PRUNING HOOKEDUCATORS SILENCE!WE SHALL LEARN WAR NO MORE.

~ David Holdsworth

Do you want to know what General Putnam is thinking? It’s this. He’s thinking that he can’t win the war if he doesn’t keep the people on his side. He’s thinking that he can’t keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population—raping the women, stealing cattle, burning houses. He is determined to scare the wits out of the troops to keep them in line. And he’s thinking that it doesn’t matter very much who he executes to do it. So many men have died, so many mothers have wept, so many brothers and sisters have cried. He is thinking that in the long run if he executes somebody, he’ll shorten the war and save more lives. It doesn’t matter to him very much who he executes; one man’s agony is like another’s, one mother’s tears are no wetter than anybody else’s. And that’s why he’s going to have Sam shot.

~ James Lincoln Collier

This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.

~ Denis De Rougemont

That afternoon, long after the stool has been put away and the waltzes have stopped, while Werner sits with his transceiver listening to nothing, a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six or seven years old, small for her age, with big clear eyes that remind him of Jutta’s. She runs across the street to the park and plays there alone, beneath the budding trees, while her mother stands on the corner and bites the tips of her fingers. The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.

~ Anthony Doerr

It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.

~ David Burr Gerrard

Wouldn’t it have been better to conserve your strength and rest?” Ildiko mused after a moment. “I’ll sleep long and hard when I’m dead. You defy death by celebrating life.

~ Grace Draven

This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)

~ Virginia Woolf

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)

~ Virginia Woolf

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

~ Azar Nafisi

You've been so used to fighting Wars with a gun in your hand that you forget to put it down. Not every fight requires a weapon of some kind, and not everything is a fight.

~ Lori Llewellyn

War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

War is a dumb game thought out by men when they become too old to play cowboys and crooks.

~ Irma Joubert

Bombs and bullets don't discriminate.

~ Sophie Masson

Truth is the first casualty of war.

~ Sophie Masson

The war never leaves.

~ Victoria Aveyard

War is a monster. War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows. And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.

~ Patrick Ness

All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war.

~ David Burr Gerrard

And isn't love between two people better than hatred, in this world of violence and mourning? There seemed to me a fragile kindness in their love that survived through this poisonous war. Even though one of them hadn't.

~ Jennifer Ryan

Before the war, she'd never have gone out in the rain and happily stood in it. Now, it was a reminder that she was alive...

~ Soraya Lane