War Quotes

The Iraqi sun quickly heated the air to an unbearable onehundred twenty three degree’s, causing an unquenchable thirst toboil up in him. Thomas then dropped his rifle under his right arm,where it hung beneath his pit by a strap called a fast sling, there theweapon dangled under his sweat soaked uniform.

~ Thomas Ferreolus

Waving from side to side in the breeze, her long golden hairshimmered as she handed Thomas a bottle of beer.“When are you coming home to me?” She said eloquently.

~ Thomas Ferreolus

Everything is like a wall. Said a scholar to the troll. Bang your head to go on through. Then you'll see, there is no queue.

~ Will Advise

Justice DeniedThousands of women, probably moreI cannot reach them behind justice doorsMany stay silent, barred just like me.Haunted by demons, faces unseen.Still by the hundreds, they continue to serveDuty and country, active and reserve.Thankless, forgotten through America's warsScarred like their brethren, treated as foes.Volunteered to go to the shores.Died like the others, shamed to the core.Where is the dignity, long since denied? Lost in the White House of Justice DeniedWomen in service since beginning of time Often they're treated like victims in crime.Where is their voice, silence throughout the years? It's dead in the Senate and House, with their tears!

~ Diane Chamberlain

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

~ Siegfried Sassoon

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.

~ Tim Hetherington

If the ability to make use of experience and draw conclusions decided, we would have forgotten what war is a long time ago. But those whose goal is war have never been held back, nor will be, by experience or analogy.

~ Andrzej Sapkowski

War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can’t feel it, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention, you are probably dead anyway.

~ Clint Van Winkle

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!

~ Marjane Satrapi

You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don't die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but action amounts to identity. We become what we do.You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can't leave your actions over there. You can't build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of the poison seeps back into our soil.

~ Megan K. Stack

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.

~ Andrew Smith

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?

~ Ray Gwyn Smith

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

~ Patrick Cockburn

...he wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be.

~ Ben Fountain

I'm trying to tell him everything will be all right, but how can I say it with a straight face? My son's no idiot. He knows when I'm lying. The medicine won't taste bad.The bath is not hot.Daddy will be safe.Lies.

~ Suzanne Hayes

But we who remain shall grow oldWe shall know the coldOf cheerlessWinter and the rain of Autumn and the stingOf poverty, of love despised and of disgraces,And mirrors showing stained and aging faces, And the long ranges of comfortless yearsAnd the long gamut of human fears...But, for you, it shall forever be spring,And only you shall be forever fearless, And only you have white, straight, tireless limbs,And only you, where the water-lily swimsShall walk along the pathways thro' the willows Of your west. You who went West, and only you on silvery twilight pillows Shall take your restIn the soft sweet gloomsOf twilight rooms...

~ Ford Madox Ford

It’s a cruel fact of war that it takes little more than applying pressure to one finger to end another person’s life. More than that, it’s a cruel fact of life that we are hardwired to follow the crowd in a moment of panic.

~ Trevor D. Richardson

We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food.

~ Ishmael Beah

YOU DEMAND SALVATION EVEN AS YOU STEAL FROM THE COLLECTION PLATE.YOU SEND FOOD TO THE REFUGEES, AND THEN YOU DON'T ALLOW THE DELIVERY TRUCKS THROUGH THE WARZONES. THE FOOD WILL SPOIL , THE SUPPLIES WILL BE SOLD BY THE VICTORS . THE CIVILIANS WILL STARVE AND SICKEN AND EVENTUALLY DIE. IT IS THE WAY OF THINGS. THEY WILL ALL DIE, WHETHER FROM THE BRUTAL SAVAGERY THAT IS UNIQUE TO MAN OR FROM THE ABUNDANCE OF DISEASE OR FROM THE SCARCITY OF SUSTENANCE.

~ Jackie Morse Kessler

The only lies that are true are the ones that you believe.

~ Colby Buzzell

Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.

~ Pushpa Rana

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.

~ Stanisław Lem

America is the world's top war-master, the most sophisticated killer-culture in history.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.

~ Eric Hansen

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

~ Clarence Darrow

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

~ Vasily Grossman

We as Christians are called to battle. The problem is, we don’t fight about the right things and we do fight about the wrong things. We aren’t getting in the battle that we should and so we fight over petty, insignificant things. Why? Because we are bored. We are soldiers created for fighting against the enemy, Satan, but instead we fight against each other.

~ Lisa Bedrick

God's anger is the toil and suffering of man. Man's anger is the love and worship of his enemy.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

i do not give a sh*t, the toilet miss me now

~ Mohlalefi J Motsima

I think that certain emotions can compromise you when you’re at war. If you stop to mourn the dead, or even to breathe in what you’ve done, you’ll be dead as well. Your brain goes to a primitive region, one inaccessible to feelings beyond pure anger and pure fear. Your brain is reduced to two impulses: fight or flight. Kill or be killed. No room for more delicate feelings. No room for a soul. All you’re thinking about is how to maneuver your body in space so it will survive.

~ Willa Strayhorn

The borders of man, defined by politics, war, and faith - all three manifestations of delusion - meant even more to gods.

~ Michael R. Fletcher

As long as man is alive, he will always deem himself to be the light of the world, and consider his enemies as the darkness. And they will be thinking like that on both sides of the front.

~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

~ Steven Magee

Men are stupid and ignorant. That is why they suffer. Instead of thinking, they believe all that they are told, all that they are taught. They choose their lords and masters without judging them, with a fatal taste for slavery.

~ Gabriel Chevallier

How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself?

~ Isaac Asimov

No weekends for the gods now. Warsflicker, earth licks its open sores,fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chanceassassinations, no advance.Only man thinning out his own kindsounds through the Sabbath noon, the blindswipe of the pruner and his knifebusy about the tree of life...Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heels of smallwar - until the end of timeto police th eearth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime.

~ Robert Lowell

I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, simulated by plunder and motivated by what they call patriotic spirit to murder, and invaded my neighbour's country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country.

~ Kahlil Gibran

For what religion has never had sects? Rest assured, Extremism is always the derrière.

~ Criss Jami

All this is what it means to regret.

~ Matthew J. Hefti