War Quotes

It's the time to run away an' hide under the bed, an' hope the world's still in one piece when you come out again.

~ Garth Ennis

War soaks into your bones, drills down into the marrow like a parasite. It blots your life like ink spilled on snow white paper, and it has its perils even long after you've given it up.

~ Christopher Johnson

What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench.

~ Stefan Hertmans

Well, I once recall an old master sergeant once telling me that NCOs look after the men so that officers can figure out how to get them killed. That's the difference between maintenance and command.

~ Garth Ennis

After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground.

~ Garth Ennis

...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field

~ Joe Abercrombie

It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world

~ Rosa Brooks

What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)

~ Rosa Brooks

I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.

~ Rosa Brooks

Love and war. Same coin. Different sides. I'm too wrinkled for either.Maybe war will breathe some life into your old bones.Well, I tried love last month. He leans close. Didn't work like it used to.Too honest, Lorn. I can't help but laugh.

~ Pierce Brown

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that just happen every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not just happen: societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

~ Rosa Brooks

First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some were baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some were baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

~ Nicholas Emmett

During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.

~ Margot Lee Shetterly

—so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car, sprays of blood shooting up from the stallions' hoofs and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—

~ Homer

When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write Escape from Saigon - a Novel I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.

~ Dick Pirozzolo

When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: We've won the war! They only said: The War is over.

~ Vera Brittain

… as General Berringer would readily admit, “If you’re in a fair fight, I’ve done something wrong.

~ T. Mountebank

She knew now that no one could be neutral - not anymore - and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie's life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need.

~ Kristin Hannah

I never thought that it would look like this. The October of 2009 was a difficult period, and not just because of the bad weather. Attacks intensified against military units and every patrol was highly dangerous. A lot of time has passed since the first time I was fired on in the open. Suddenly, bullets fly right over my head… fraction of a second separates me from tensing my muscles and starting to shoot from a gun turret placed on top our Humvee. I know that I was lucky as hell, but as you know, normally none of us need to talk about it. (excerpt of the book Wild Heads of War)

~ Artur Fidler

I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?

~ Robert M. Gates

Every sword that was dripping the blood became a pen. Every word that was written in it became a poetry.

~ Akshay Vasu

European historians have often, though not unanimously, assumed that European modern warfare was the one true path, a system that developed logically and inevitably from the nature of the advancing technology of guns. Since Europeans by their own definition were the most rational and logical of people, their mode of warfare was also the most rational and logical. Those who did not adopt it after seeing it were being deliberately irrational, or lacked the ability to advance their polity to the point where it could follow it.

~ Peter A. Lorge

I was done with hesitation. It wasn't just that we'd run out of options, or that so much was riding on the firebird's power. I'd simply grown ruthless enough or selfish enough to take another creature's life. But I missed the girl who had shown the stag mercy, who had been strong enough to turn away from the lure of power, who had believed in something more. Another casualty of this war.

~ Leigh Bardugo

Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon's retreat to make the Ascension's bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time.

~ Amor Towles

Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.

~ Suzy Kassem

If we are to survive, I must start and end my war this same day.

~ Heather Day Gilbert

We call this a “bow”, Cap’n, and the thing that’s sticking out of that fellow’s head over on the other side of the trench is called an “arrow”. If you put them together just right, they’ll do all sorts of nice things to people who aren’t nice.

~ David Eddings

The Government finally decidedTo wage the war all-out. Defeat is Un-American. And they took to the air,Their women beside themin bouffant hairdosputting nail-polish on thegunship cannon-buttons.And they never came downfor they found,the groundis Pro-Communist. And dirty.And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

~ Gary Snyder

It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties.-- Nenya, The Water Warrior

~ Mili Fay

With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national ‘pretexts,’ led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.

~ Ernst Jünger

The world after a war is a good world, I told myself. A happy world. A secure world. In this world, I might do anything.

~ Jennifer Niven

History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.

~ Enoch Powell

Soldiers of capitalism are the fathers of dissent.

~ Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

When two warring people face each other, the war of words jumps beyond the subject. The subject remains no more central to the arguments.

~ Girdhar Joshi

The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Why don't we like them? Katalin asked. Because they don't treat us right. After Zoltán said it, he marveled at the realization that in trying to clarify years of abuses and lists of grievances, that in trying to make oppression understandable for a child, he had reduced the horror of Soviet domination to one simple, honest statement of fact: The Russians didn't treat the Hungarians right.

~ Doris Mortman

Where there is war, we know peace has failed, and when peace has failed, we know many will die. And when many will die, we fear the worst, that the whole world will rise up to end the fighting, and if that happens many many more will die. War is an unending process, that only results in death of good men an women, who otherwise, could have done done much more in their life, war is a sad thing, but at the same time it is a good thing. We hunt animals to keep them from overrunning us, well war keeps us from overpopulating the earth and running out of resources, and war makes science invent new things sooner than they would have been if there had been no war. So while war is a horrible thing, it is also a blessing in disguise.

~ Satuin Segi

To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.

~ Carsten Jensen