Quotes About Warfare

Your armies are going to pieces, but theirs stay put, and the same applies to the air forces. They are probing for weak spots all over the world, and wherever they find one they will move in. Their propaganda war has never been so active.

We leafed through a series of the [1941 Soviet] Front newspaper. I came across the following phrase in a leading article: 'The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.

There was something terrible, but also something sad and melancholy in this long cry uttered by the Russian infantry as they staged an attack. As it crossed the cold water, it lost its fervour. Instead of valour or gallantry, you could hear the sadness of a soul parting with everything that it loved, calling on its nearest and dearest to wake up, to lift their head from their pillows and hear for the last time the voice of a father, a husband, a son or a brother...

To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. "Humiliate," here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others.

After September 1939, perhaps one billion of the world's roughly two billion population were soldiers, partisans, and producers engaged in trying to kill people.

Nor was combat fatal to most combatants; annihilation of entire armies was rare in the classical age, as the nearly uniform adoption of the panoply—the Greeks' bronze breastplate, shield, helmet, greaves, spear, and sword—ensured protection from repeated attacks.

Future generations will learn whether human nature has remained constant—and thus enemies who face only a temporary loss of freedom will prove more, not less, bloodthirsty against both soldier and civilian.

That is the explanation of war, an outrage by humanity upon humanity in despite of humanity.

Civil war.... What did the words mean? Was there any such thing as foreign war? Was not all warfare between men warfare between brothers?

Seated on a paving-stone near Enjolras, Courfeyrac continued to jeer at the cannon, and every passage of that sinister cloud of projectiles that is called grapeshot, accompanied by its monstrous din, drew from him an ironical comment. 'You're wearing yourself out, you poor old brute. You're getting hoarse. You're not thundering, only spluttering. It's breaking my heart.' His remarks were greeted with laughter.

The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen, hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood, in the somber wheatfields, at the spot where today at four in the morning, whistling, and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Nivelles.

This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and killed several panes of glass.

pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre on our heads." These

with the exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul means.

Ce qui est certain, c'est que, d'ordinaire, après les vainqueurs viennent les voleurs. Mais mettons le soldat, surtout le soldat contemporain, hors de cause.

the SS are Ã¢â'¬Â¦ brutes. The Allied victories in Africa are hitting us hard. And this final solution for the Jews Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it is an evil impossible to comprehend. I…" He

Every man who invents something to kill other people easily, quickly and in as great numbers as possible is highly praised, he makes much money and a decoration is bestowed on him. That is good and right. War must be. But on the other hand the Europeans build many hospitals, and a man who during a war cures and feeds enemy soldiers is also praised and decorated

We've sterilized war, made it easy. Stripped it of the smell of infection and the silence of death. We've bled off the terror and the sorrow. And because of us, the power to wage war now rests in the hands of cowards and hypocrites.

There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is: 'To use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum time.

Patton was bombed, strafed, shelled—but he thrived on it. At the summit of a badly littered road over a hill he stopped to survey the scarred and scorched landscape of war—rubbish that used to be farms, fields in which the grass was burning, hundreds of stiff-legged, dead cattle. He threw out his arms as if trying to embrace the scene, and shouted to the sky, "Could anything be more magnificent?!

Ladislas Farago

These soldiers had done what they had done, and been done unto in return. This was how it went. In the cycle of slaughter, reprisal begat reprisal, forever.

There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill their own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don't they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work!

Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.