War Quotes

Those who are skilled in combat do not become angry. The wise win before the fight and the ignorant fight to win.

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

One should never fight for a country. One should fight, if one has to, for what one believes to be right. A country is only as good as its leading citizens.

~ Garry Douglas Kilworth

Fire supposed he needed to be there in order to give rousing speeches and lead the charge into the fray, or whatever is was commanders did in wartime. She resented his competence at something so tragic and senseless. She wished he, or somebody, would throw down his sword and say, 'Enough! This is a silly way to decide who's in charge!' And it seemed to her, as the beds in the healing room filled and emptied and filled, that these battles didn't leave much to be in charge of. The kingdom was already broken, and this war was tearing the broken pieces smaller.

~ Kristin Cashore

There is no honor in sending men to die for something you won't even fight for yourself

~ Mark Owen

Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.

~ A.j.p. Taylor

Otaguro’s bosom heaved with an ineffable surge of joy. “Every man is fighting,” he murmured. “Every man.

~ Yukio Mishima

And so this is Christmas...what have you done?

~ John Lennon

Oh the madness of battle! We fear it, we celebrate it, the poets sing of it, and when it fills the blood like fire it is a real madness. It is joy! All the terror is swept away, a man feels he could live for ever, he sees the enemy retreating, knows he himself is invincible, that even the gods would shrink from his blade and his bloodied shield. And I was still keening that mad song, the battle song of slaughter, the sound that blotted out the screams of dying men and the crying of the wounded. It is fear, of course, that feeds the battle madness, the release of fear into savagery. You win in the shield wall by being more savage than your enemy, by turning his savagery back into fear.

~ Bernard Cornwell

How stand I, then,That have a father killed, a mother stained,Excitements of my reason and my blood,And let all sleep, while to my shame I seeThe imminent death of twenty thousand menThat for a fantasy and trick of fameGo to their graves like beds, fight for a plotWhereon the numbers cannot try the cause,Which is not tomb enough and continentTo hide the slain? O, from this time forthMy thoughts be bloody or be nothing

~ William Shakespeare

How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.

~ Karl Marlantes

[Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

~ George Orwell

What worries me is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

God works through people by stirring their hearts and sometimes people never know how they are helping others.

~ Colby Buzzell

She wore a fitted gown of gold that shimmered in the dim light. Her regal grace bedazzled him, in spite of his best attempts at feigning disinterest. She was even more beautiful than he remembered.He let his breath out in a hiss.He realized he had stopped breathing. There she was, the woman for whom he had risked everything. Never did he dare to harbor any hope of seeing her again. Yet after five long and bloody years, their paths had crossed once more.

~ Jennifer Mckeithen

And yet it's there, we witnessed it being lit. And fires once lit have to burn until they spend themselves or someone extinguishes them,” Anaxantis said, with some deep regret coating his voice.

~ Andrew Ashling

Who in the universe halts when the enemy tells them to?

~ Sherwood Smith

Puss hopped down from the couch and rummaged in Mark’s closet until he found a black leather belt. This he looped along his shoulder, around his waist, and then clasped together. “I’m off to make war, so that you may have love.

~ Zechariah Barrett

A line that reads, 'Died gallantly' would tell a truer story, often, if it read, 'Died screaming'; and instead of the total number of troops who 'sacrificed' their lives, we might simply chisel onto a block of marble the number of limbs left on the battlefield or in hospitals, the number of body parts unaccounted for, missing in action. Such a memorial would be unthinkable, of course, and I must confess that even I would find it tasteless. But if you want the truth about war, you have to start and end with the screaming.

~ Craig Juresevic

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

~ Richard Flanagan

Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.

~ Jeff Shaara

To Polyakov it was as though a fierce wind from downstream was sweeping up the Volga. Several times he was knocked off his feet; he fell to the ground no longer knowing what world he lived in, whether he was old or young, what was up and what was down. But Klimov dragged him along and finally they slid to the bottom of a huge crater. Here the darkness was threefold: the darkness of night, the darkness of dust and smoke, the darkness of a deep pit.They lay there beside one another; the same soft light, the same prayer for life filled both their heads. It was the same light, the same touching hope that glows in all heads and all hearts – in those of birds and animals as well as in those of human beings.

~ Vasily Grossman

The Homunculi may have started the war, but we were the ones who carried it out.

~ Hiromu Arakawa

War doesn’t start with an explosion….It bears far more subtlety. A simmer beneath the surface, as if bringing broth to a boil.

~ Kristina Mcmorris

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero

~ Gabriel García Márquez

He who whets his steel, whets his courage.

~ Steven Pressfield

War’s all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now.

~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

~ Lee Strauss

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

~ Nadifa Mohamed

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths, they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

~ Nadifa Mohamed

Even still, it wasn't over. For if a battle could be won so easily, men would soon forget its horrors and clamor for it all the more. War would come more than once or twice a generation. Easy victories would produce men who were struck dumb with their own unbelievably improbable successes. Such men wold begin to think they had devised not the superior tactic, but rather the supreme tactic at winning

~ Jason Born

Septimus grinned. It's not coins I seek. I seek the power of Hercules.

~ Jason Born

The great Sugambrian shrugged. I did. I supposed you've proven your worth. But no man should have to kill his own father. I should know.

~ Jason Born

So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?

~ Dominique Wilson

America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Jeffries and Quaker wife Amy, is also haunted by betrayal and a relentless, deadly enemy seeking to destroy him. Facing his own worst fears, Nathan is hunter and hunted in a violent world at war.

~ Bert J. Hubinger

When honor and glory get your squad killed and your brothers-in-arms shoved under the rug, you stop believing in the terms.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

Damn the wars but bless the soldier.

~ T.l. Moffitt

...Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

~ Tyrtaeus

Enemies,' the wizard said, 'are the price of honour.

~ Terry Goodkind

There was no honor in war, less in killing, and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.

~ Michael Scott