Quotes About Warfare

I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back.

Haig and his colleague General Robertson's commitment to trench warfare—in the belief that conscripted soldiers were too untrained to do anything other than stand in a line and walk forward—had a devastating effect on the casualty lists.

The frontal attacks puzzled me. Why advance straight into German machine-gun fire? Why not make flank attacks?" These suicidal charges worked occasionally only because Stalin did not care how many of his own soldiers died.

Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.

The death of 500,000 dead Iraqi children was "a very hard choice, but the price-we think the price is worth it

IN THOSE DAYS, your village might change hands every few weeks, one day to the Communists, the next to the Nationalists, the next to the Japanese. How easy it was to mistake your brother for a traitor or your beloved for an enemy, to fear that you yourself were born in the wrong moment of history. But in the teahouses, anyone could share a few songs, anyone could lift their wine cup and toast the validity and the continuity of love.

my rifle had brought death and destruction

Achilles makes a sound like choking. "There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw." His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector's throat.

Do you think Aristos Achaion fights in hopeless wars?

May I give you some advice? If you are truly his friend, you will help him leave this soft heart behind. He's going to Troy to kill men, not rescue them." His dark eyes held me like swift-running current. "He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.

If they break through the wall, they will burn the ships—our only way of getting home, the only thing that makes us an army instead of refugees.

You were born into a savage war.

Now, if you believed both assumptions, if they were woven into your deepest convictions about the world, you would want to learn to pray like a soldier wants to learn to use his weapon, like a smoke jumper wants to learn survival skills. We really have no idea what sort of breakthrough is actually possible until we learn to pray. Perhaps we, too, will be ending droughts and stopping wildfires.

We were there to do what had to be done. Using napalm didn't fit with peacetime sensitivities, but peace and a return to the sensitivities that it permitted were what we were fighting to achieve.

When possible, never let the enemy know what you know.

I've killed a lot of men, Preacher, all brave soldiers on the field. You're the first coward." "Pete, no, no!" Dexter said, raising his hands and falling back into his chair, eyes wide and mouth open. "If it's about Liza, I can explain. No, Pete!

He had a force of some seven hundred men, and aimed to wear down his opponents in a guerrilla war.

French troops had to evacuate Scotland

Border skirmishes were the norm. Outright war was the exception

A set-piece battle would almost inevitably end in a crushing defeat for the Scots.

than of a border skirmish that went tragically wrong.

Forced to retreat by a smaller but better-disciplined English battalion, the Scots were snared.

She turned next to Moray's base in Fife, cutting his supply lines.

All seemed to be over when Bothwell's mainmast was shot away by a cannonball