Quotes About Warfare

National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob, always demented and the second a king, generally sane.

Whoever has the sword will have the earth.

Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.

You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knos waht warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure youo didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's waht you were born for.

Because here's the thing?we don't give a shit about fairness here. We're soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get. Your kind of murder only works among civilians. And you were too cocky, too stupid, too insane to realize it.

Government is all show when it isn't murder in the dark ... or soldiers in the open.

Strategies and formations were nice, but they were nothing if the soldiers didn't know how to handle themselves in battle.

Ender Wiggin isn't a killer. He just wins—thoroughly. If anybody's going to be scared, let it be the buggers." "Makes you almost feel sorry for them, knowing Ender's going to be coming after them.

The power to kill is the only power that matters. -Enders game.

We do have a right to defend ourselves as best we can, and the only way we found that works is killing the buggers before they kill us.

The enemy's gate was down.

Going to say it anyway, said Graff. Poor fool of a boy. Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?

Until you know that you're tougher than the enemy, you maneuver, you don't commit to battle.

You've got to do something with your life,' said Mazer. And there it was: The tacit recognition that Ender wasn't going home. That he was never going to lead a normal life on Earth.

And it had to be a child, Ender,' said Mazer. 'You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know. You were reckless and brilliant and young. It's what you were born for.

Pacifism only works with an enemy that can't bear to do murder against the innocent. How many times are you lucky enough to get an enemy like that?

That's how war is fought, in case any of you have foolish ideas to the contrary. You don't fight with minimum force, you fight with maximum force at endurable cost. You don't just pink your enemy, you don't even bloody him, you destroy his capability to fight back. It's the strategy you use with diseases.

Through their training, they had all learned that winning depended on being able to forget everything but what you were doing at that moment. You could hold all your ships in your mind at once — but only if any ship that no longer matters could be blocked out completely. Thinking about dead men, about torn bodies having the air sucked out of their lungs by the cold vacuum of space, who could still play the game knowing that this was what it really meant?

In wartime, commanders have always had to learn the concept of "acceptable losses." But those who keep their humanity never really accept the idea of acceptability

There are hard wars and easy wars. It's easy to conquer a country whose people hate their own government more than they hate the invaders. It's hard to fight a war when your army knows that back home, their families are rooting for the other side.

They gave us the stardrive we used to get to them, and the weapon we used to kill them. They gave us everything.

Ender conocía las reglas nunca dichas de la guerra entre hombres, aunque sólo tuviera seis años. Estaba prohibido golpear al oponente caído indefenso en el suelo; sólo un animal lo haría. Precisamente por eso se acercó al cuerpo inerme de Stilson y le dio otra parada en las costillas, con saña.

War gets invented every time there's somebody so hungry for domination that he can't leave peaceful nations alone.