Quotes About Warfare

Civilians had a tendency to fetishize military dead without ever considering how and why they died.

T]hose who love to contrast the past with our recent times should consider what modern civilization has brought us to in terms of war. A change of level has occurred; from the warrior who fights for the honor and for the right of his lord, society has shifted to the type of the mere "soldier" that is found in association with the removal of all transcendent or even religious elements in the idea of fighting.

They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant

Put Hannibal in the scales.

One of these days I'd really like to win a battle, rather than just stand quiet while they lose it at me. You know, just to be able say I'd done it. But I'm not complaining. I mean, it works.

He took a couple of steps. "I clink," he said. "It's undignified." "Everybody clinks. It's what soldiers do.

Here they fight with messers. God help them.

The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb . . . will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.

Oh dear," Lionel says from the front, hefting his rifle, "it seems that we've kicked a hornet's nest here. Do those look like elite troops to anyone else?", FADE by Kailin Gow

Those who are born to uphold Dharma in this world always have to wage war.

Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won't. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America's imaginative engagement with my nation.

sealed zinc coffins, like the fallen Russian soldiers in Afghanistan – so that no one would know how they had really died.

Extraordinarily, I was up in the cemetery in Derry City, and I had a red cape on with a fur hood as a little girl, when a gun battle broke out between the IRA and the British Army, and I got caught in the crossfire.

I used to be the third person in the secret jets we had - they were secret at the time - a jet bomber that flew at immense heights carrying atomic bombs.

President Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.

We teach our boys to firebomb villages, but we won't let them write fuck on the side of their planes because it's obscene.

They fell, but o'er their glorious grave Floats free the banner of the cause they died to save.

weapon for action. "'Be ye men of peace,'" he intoned, "'but gird firmly thy loins for righteous battle!' Thus saith the Lord God which is Jehovah. Selah!

Franklin D. Roosevelt

So much for Western origin stories, which depict our forebears as ferocious, fearless, and free. Unbound by social commitments and merciless toward their enemies, they seem to have stepped straight out of your typical action movie. Present-day political thought keeps clinging to these macho myths, such as the belief that we can treat the planet any way we want, that humanity will be waging war forever, and that individual freedom takes precedence over community.

Tanaghrisson stepped up to where Jumonville lay. "Tu n'es pas encore mort, mon père," he said; Thou art not yet dead, my father. He raised his hatchet and sank it in the ensign's head, striking until he had shattered the cranium. Then he reached into the skull, pulled out a handful of viscous tissue, and washed his hands in Jumonville's brain.

Hoc tibi iuventus Romana indicimus bellum.

Contemporary warfare, then, is best practiced by the professional serial killer.

America can take many things, but she cannot take massive casualties. Saddam can. They don't matter to him.