Quotes About Warfare

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one.

First we attacked the Russian soldiers with our gases, and then when we saw the poor fellows lying there, dying slowly, we tried to make breathing easier for them by using our own life-saving devices on them.

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value.

THE IMPORTANCE OF lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by Europeans' conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords. Those germs undermined Indian resistance by killing most Indians and their leaders and by sapping the survivors' morale.

Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed for us a stage where we made one of the most crucial decisions in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population growth or trying to increase food production, we opted for the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny. The same choice faces us today, with the difference that we now can learn from the past.

Todas las historias militares que glorifican a los grandes generales simplifican en exceso la prosaica verdad: los vencedores de las guerras del pasado no fueron siempre los ejércitos que disponían de los mejores generales y las mejores armas, sino que a menudo fueron simplemente aquellos que portaban los gérmenes más desagradables para transmitirlos a sus enemigos.

Thanks to their mastery of horses and rifles, the Plains Indians of North America, the Araucanian Indians of southern Chile, and the Pampas Indians of Argentina fought off invading whites longer than did any other Native Americans, succumbing only to massive army operations by white governments in the 1870s and 1880s.

the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

Far more Native Americans died in bed from Eurasian germs than on the battlefield from European guns and swords.

Farmers tend to breathe out nastier germs, to own better weapons and armor, to own more-powerful technology in general, and to live under centralized governments with literate elites better able to wage wars of conquest.

Just as wealth is no longer measured by the ostentation of wealth but by the secret circulation of speculative capital, so war is not measured by being waged but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic and informational space, the same space in which capital moves.

Una declaración de guerra no es tanto una advertencia a las potencias, como a sus súbditos. El extranjero, bien sea rey, bien sea particular, bien sea pueblo, que roba, mata o apresa a un súbdito sin declarar la guerra al príncipe, no es un enemigo; es un ciminal.

History is a story of violence at work. It all comes down to the old saw that, however much you can gain with a kind word, you can gain more with a kind word and a gun.

Soldiers win battles and generals get the medals.

I like generals. I like Napoleon. I like strategy. The majority of them are praised for mass destruction, but it's exciting to see how it comes to the mind mentally.

I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles, it has to have some kind of psychological impact.

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.

I have already said that I find the coalition air strikes to be insufficient. A ground intervention will be necessary to overcome Daesh.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

Clearly, we need a strong economy to build a strong military.

Every person I killed I strongly believe that they were bad. When I do go face God there is going to be lots of things I will have to account for but killing any of those people is not one of them.