War Quotes

Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.

~ Darrell Drake

...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...

~ Rosa Brooks

The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Ask him where his shame is. They spoke. He says this is war. There is no shame in war. Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.

~ Khaled Hosseini

What does it matter who is ruler of a realm that no longer exists?

~ Krishna Udayasankar

... Blood pounded inside his skull.The pounding became more distinct. A thundering and a racing of hoofs, rising like a storm over the hills to the north. The triumphant baying of the Saxon war-horns was echoed by others, more distant. These were higher, shriller, the prelude to the storm.Cavalry bugles. Bedwyr's lungs were full of smoke and blood, else he would have laughed.The dragon had come at last.

~ David Pilling

To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs,but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time norspace. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousandyears: your life and the life of all the visible and invisiblebeings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alterit, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. Allelse, but seems to us to be.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.

~ Sara Nović

I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.

~ Sara Nović

My mother used to say, Preeto, there is never a right or a wrong side to a problem, but there can be to people. Not everyone here is on the right side, not everyone there is. You need to ask yourself, which side do you want to be on?

~ Sanchit Gupta

All they want is to point a finger.

~ Sanchit Gupta

Once you are a warrior, you must live like one. You can't be afraid to fight against and destroy anything that fights against what is right.

~ Melita Tessy

You killed the mandir in their homes, you killed the masjid in ours.

~ Sanchit Gupta

No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.

~ Martha Gellhorn

In a war, the first casualty is human dignity.

~ Paulo Coelho

Yes, there are plenty of politicians who are liars, there is no doubt about this! But some of them are not only liars but also serial killers because they deliberately send people to the wars!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Be resolved that honor is heavier than the mountains and death lighter than the feather.

~ Yasuo Kuwahara

Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this.

~ Kaoru Kurimoto

I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.

~ Agona Apell

Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.

~ Pyrrhus

I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.

~ Martha Gellhorn

A hero is a matter of perspective. The only sure thing in war is casualties. Ideology, patriotism and religious zeal all fuel heroic notions.

~ Matt Hawkins

Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.

~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.Wartime looks like this.

~ Janine Di Giovanni

Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.

~ Yasuo Kuwahara

As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.

~ Moonshine Noire

What the war did to the dreamers.

~ Anthony Doerr

The seriousness of being part of Operation Desert Storm-the first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War- was never lost upon us.

~ Carlos Wallace

Staring down the reality of war, far from home, asleep among strangers, that familiarity, those memories, those ties kept us going; gave us a reason to persevere; toughened us up.

~ Carlos Wallace

You fight by rules to keep your humanity

~ Adam Makos

There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly. …in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness the first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards—they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, 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

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?

~ Erich Maria Remarque

And be very careful at the front, Paul.”Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

~ Erich Maria Remarque

I hated him for making me stop hating him

~ Tim O'brien

It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.

~ Frank Herbert

Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. (Fish for silence.)

~ Erik Pevernagie

No one lives long in a war. I don't want to lose you as well.

~ Sanchit Gupta

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

~ Viet Thanh Nguyen