War Quotes

Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

Where would the world be if we took every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best- in a way that cost them nothing.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

A young body, a young heart, and endless courage. That last part is the most important. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Why do you think we used to send so many kids your age off to war?

~ Karina Halle

It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties.

~ Mili Fay

I am a Warrior of Virtue, Nenya, the Water Warrior. Ardan is safe at last. That is all that matters. That is all that will ever matter...

~ Mili Fay

I had him in my cab once.Who? Neville askedRupert Brooke. He was good, him. There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?

~ Pat Barker

But war had a taming effect

~ Nadia Hashimi

In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive.

~ Sergei Lukyanenko

On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Moscow in February 2008 at an informal summit of the CIS. During the summit he told Putin that he was ready to say no to NATO in exchange for Russian help with the reintegration of the two breakaway territories. Saakashvili claimed “that ‘Putin did not even think for a minute” about his proposal. “[Putin] smiled and said, ‘We do not exchange your territories for your geopolitical orientation... And it meant ‘we will chop off your territories anyway.’”Saakashvili asked him to talk about the growing tensions along the borders with South Ossetia, saying, “It could not be worse than now.” “That’s when he [Putin] looked at me and said: ‘And here you are very wrong. You will see that very soon it will be much, much, much worse.’” [234]

~ Marcel H. Van Herpen

On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into its midst a nation or territory that so desired.”Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the — naive — conclusion that “the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia... could lead to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but] in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” [237]

~ Marcel H. Van Herpen

Well, when you're fourteen years old, you can't afford to mix in a rock fight with your five-year-old brother. You can't do it, even when you're in the right. You just can't explain a thing like that to your folks. All they'll do is point out how much bigger you are, how unfair it is to your little brother.

~ Fred Gipson

Takin’ it to ISIS, man!” Blue Jacket thumped his chest twice, and I read the saying on his shirt: Turning ISIS into WASWAS.

~ Jennifer Lane

Death is buried there into death Hunger strikes on its own last breathNo spine to shiver, no heart talks At life’s craving poverty mocksFrom the poem 'Exhumation

~ Munia Khan

In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich.

~ Miles Watson

That was the funny thing. What happened to John would pass for his classmates, but for John it was a long challenging road ahead of him. Who knew where he would be sent, maybe a juvenile detention center? He might keep in touch with a few friends if his parents let him, but he would never return to Wakefield High. His peers had no clue the journey ahead of him, that his life was changed forever. And they had no idea what lay ahead for Lilly. No one knew she had been given a task by the Archangels to fight a war against pure evil. They had no idea that Lilly would spend most of her free time not training for a marathon, but training to kill demons. John and Lilly were not all too different.

~ Ellie Elisabeth

We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than abandon our God, and our religion.

~ Jeanne D'albret

Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand. And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands. We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries. It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies. That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow. Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit. They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence.

~ Miles Watson

The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both.

~ Miles Watson

The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself [228]

~ Marcel H. Van Herpen

How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.

~ Svetlana Alexievich

The “Lost Day” film and the comments by Putin and Medvedev have revealed a great deal: that the invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was indeed a preplanned aggression and that so-called “Russian peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia were in fact the vanguard of the invading forces that were in blatant violation of Russia’s international obligations and were training and arming the separatist forces.The admission by Putin that Ossetian separatist militias acted as an integral part of the Russian military plan transfers legal responsibility for acts of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians and mass marauding inside and outside of South Ossetia to the Russian military and political leadership. Putin’s admission of the prewar integration of the Ossetian separatist militias into the Russian General Staff war plans puts into question the integrity of the independent European Union war report, written by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini that accused the Georgians of starting the war and attacking Russian “peacekeepers,” which, according to Tagliavini, warranted a Russian military response.

~ Павел Фельгенгауэр

The outcome of battle is never in a warrior’s control. What is in his control is how he chooses to fight and what he chooses to fight for. Today, I choose to fight to keep the Anartas and Sindhuvarta free of the invaders – and I choose to fight such that the enemy will speak of me in their legends for generations to come.

~ Shatrujeet Nath

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

~ Anthony Doerr

In battle, it is not the strongest or the bravest or those with the greater numbers who win. Victory belongs to the side that best understands the price of defeat.

~ Shatrujeet Nath

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.

~ Robert Graves

It’s not that. It’s just… never mind. Water under the bridge.” I stand up and head for my room. Two against one. No man ever won this war. It’s why we fight them against other men. At least there is a chance at victory.

~ Faleena Hopkins

Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was “This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy.” That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.

~ Joan Didion

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.

~ Timothy Snyder

Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.

~ Frank Herbert

Everything is fair and possible in love, war, and politics.

~ Chandana Roy

The war had remade her. Reshaped her purpose. Why couldn’t she unmake it again?

~ Kameron Hurley

Nobody returned alive from the war.

~ Andrija Jonić

Can't be on the front lines fighting a war with the weapons given to you by the enemy.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Human survival requires that nation-states give up the institution of war and replace it with a cooperatively-functioning global peace system - for the well-being and security of all people everywhere.

~ Douglas P. Fry

Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.

~ Michael Ondaatje

For a chic and an honorable full victory, you must make your own fight and win your own battle entirely by yourself! Try to refuse any help to get a pure victory, a victory which belongs merely to yourself!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...

~ Joseph Heller

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.

~ Eric Hobsbawm

This arrogant, perfumed young noble, in his rustling silks and polished lamellar armour, knew nothing of the hardships of war.

~ David Pilling