War Quotes

I don't fight without reason. I don't want war without end.

~ Rick Riordan

Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, impetuous soul.

~ Vasily Grossman

When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the riddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid, I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child's pull-tab book.We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.

~ Kevin Powers

It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict . . . There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex —everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.

~ Angelina Jolie

I think that a kind of guilt works at a subconscious level in the minds of the Bengalis regarding the women tortured during the Liberation War. The War went on only for nine months, it was the responsibility of the people of that liberated nation that the period of torture was lengthened beyond that for these women. This is presented to the reader in my novel Talaash, by narrating the story of 30 years of that post-War abuse. Maybe because there was a subconscious guilt about it, readers didn't reject it, they've tried to assimilate it to their own emotions. Such an indication is quite clear in the testimonials of the jury board, reviews of Talaash or reader feedback that I've received on a personal level. Talaash is perhaps a successful book in that it awakened sleeping consciences. But if such a situation should arise again, there's no guarantee that they're not going to behave the same way. In fact, it's more than probable that they will. Because the fault at the root, that issue of satittyo or the honor of women—that remains unresolved. (Interview in Eclectica Magazine, 2007)

~ Shaheen Akhtar

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

~ C.s. Lewis

There is no sanctity. This is the downfall of innocence.

~ Nadège Richards

The macabre who lived through the war have a story they loved to tell about the soldiers of the Foreign Legion giving a ball in the expanses around Verdun and dancing with the corpses. Alabama's continued brewing of the poisoned filter for a semiconscious banquet table, her insistence on the magic and glamor of life when she was already feeling its pulse like the throbbing of an amputated leg, had something of the same sinister quality.

~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Displaced Person’s SongIf you see a train this evening,Far away, against the sky,Lie down in your woolen blanket,Sleep and let the train go by.Trains have called us, every midnight,From a thousand miles away,Trains that pass through empty cities,Trains that have no place to stay.No one drives the locomotive,No one tends the staring light,Trains have never needed riders,Trains belong to bitter night.Railway stations stand deserted,Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,What we left them, trains inherit,Trains go on, and we grow old.Let them cry like cheated lovers,Let their cries find only wind,Trains are meant for night and ruin,And we are meant for song and sin.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Are these soldiers really our enemy, or only the worst reflection of our own selves?... We made them. We have to unmake them, not just defeat or kill them.

~ Kate Elliott

First, our enemies were the natives, then they were the Nazis, then after a while it was the communists. Finally, at the pinnacle of what we’re calling civilization, our enemies are the Islamic terrorists. Our enemies seem to change over the course of history along with our ways of fighting them. But what hasn't changed is government profit; politicians and leaders seem to always be getting richer by the blood of our soldiers. Makes you wonder who the real enemy has been all this time.

~ Bruce Crown

In the future, we should anticipate seeing more hybrid wars where conventional warfare, irregular warfare, asymmetric warfare, and information warfare all blend together, creating a very complex and challenging situation to the combatants; therefore it will require military forces to posses hybrid capabilities, which might help deal with hybrid threats.

~ Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono

No matter how slow or long it takes, it is never too late to right a wrong.

~ Mark W. Boyer

Whenever you become aware of a conflict in the world, realize that you only perceive it as a conflict because it resonates with something that's already inside of you.

~ Auliq Ice

Divide and conquer. That’s the global elite’s proven strategy when it comes to its treatment of Third World countries in Africa and indeed throughout the world. Or, to put it another way, order out of chaos is the global elite’s favored tactic. They engineer chaos by financing both sides of revolutions, movements and civil wars then create order by providing solutions to governments and citizens in these war-torn countries.

~ James Morcan

This war ends, then so do the taxpayer-funded contracts, the drumbeats in the media, the nice Combatant faces, and the patriotic cause to lull the civilians and shame the dissenters. The other thing that comes to an end is all the justification for why this country's run the way it is. People will wonder why their paychecks are still getting halved to pay off the men who own their utility companies, their roads, their national parks. They'll wonder why they've got to work eighty-hour weeks to support the folks who took their houses and destroyed the middle-class jobs. There's not going to be an enemy to point a finger at anymore. People will see the real problem.

~ S.j. Kincaid

When free men stand, they will always carry on and lift Liberty yet unfree men shall always struggle to fight for freedom and liberty until they attain it.

~ Auliq Ice

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...

~ Oswald Spengler

A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?

~ Erich Maria Remarque

In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun.

~ H.g. Wells

If the afterlife really is a big war,” Kaladin said, “then I hope I end up in Damnation. At least there I might be able to get a wink or two of sleep.

~ Brandon Sanderson

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.

~ Otto Von Bismarck

Hopefully one day wars will only be fought in movies and may the best producer win

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Love is winning the war without starting the war. (L'amour, c'est gagner la guerre - Sans commencer la guerre)

~ Charles De Leusse

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace...

~ Stephen E. Ambrose

...'you have to ask yourself though, who are we to stop a war?’I sigh, wishing that the glittering pinpricks above us were truly stars. It was rare to see any due to the endless cloud cover. ‘Who are we not to?’ I say, to no one in particular. If we weren’t willing to try, then what did that say about us? I try to ignore the pessimistic voice eating away at my thoughts. Change could start with a few, but real change needed thousands.

~ H.j. Stephens

It isn't about being fair and equal. It's about the difference between right and wrong. He stared out at the bloody Elinarch. And this was wrong.

~ Jim Butcher

It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn't erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman's axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.

~ Margaret Atwood

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

~ Sara Sheridan

The veneer of civilization fell away to reveal desperate animals, humanity at their worst.

~ Travis Luedke

th' unconquerable will,/ And study of revenge, immortal hate,/ And courage never to submit or yield/ And what is else not to be overcome?

~ John Milton

This is the beginning of the end (talking about the war)... Everyone was saying... But the British Prime Minister said, This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Do you see the difference?

~ Anne Frank

We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

~ Howard Zinn

Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them. . . . mediation, keeping a distance from the actual events and being privileged enough not to have to witness them.

~ Javier Marías

It's possible to avoid a war. It's impossible to stop it.

~ Arely Martinez Garcia

Lebanon: the country where everyone wants a piece while we want peace.

~ Sandra Chami Kassis

You don't learn about war by sitting in libraries. Though if people spent more time in libraries, maybe there would be fewer wars.

~ Joanne Hall

It must be instilled in man that ‘peace’ is the best legacy we would leave behind for the generations to come, as we practice and follow the edicts of human rights.

~ Henrietta Newton Martin

The massive heart wrenching barbaric violations and battles among the international states or even the Big Powers, megalomania ,‘ folie de grandeur’,and even the UN Peace keeping forces lead us only to understand of the meager contribution to the subject of IHL

~ Henrietta Newton Martin

Fallujah was a Guernica with no Picasso. A city of 300,000 was deprived of water, electricity, and food, emptied of most of its inhabitants who ended up parked in camps. Then came the methodical bombing and recapture of the city block by block. When soldiers occupied the hospital, The New York Times managed to justify this act on grounds that the hospital served as an enemy propaganda center by exaggerating the number of casualties. And by the way, just how many casualties were there? Nobody knows, there is no body count for Iraqis. When estimates are published, even by reputable scientific reviews, they are denounced as exaggerated. Finally, the inhabitants were allowed to return to their devastated city, by way of military checkpoints, and start to sift through the rubble, under the watchful eye of soldiers and biometric controls.

~ Jean Bricmont