Quotes About Warfare

In the immensity of earth, sky and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech – and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen.

The Swedes captured 5,000 new uniforms, broke into monasteries, held the monks to ransom, and opened the crypts to steal rings from the corpses. They took even more from the living, including 10,000 books which they sent to quench Queen Christina's thirst for knowledge.

Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526.

The cornerstone of the Roman legionnaires' astonishing fighting spirit can be attributed to their training.

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

“Attack the Midianites and strike them dead.

So a thousand men were recruited from each tribe of Israel—twelve thousand armed for war.

Then they burned all the cities where the Midianites had lived, as well as all their encampments,

and carried away all the plunder and spoils, both people and animals.

and 32,000 women who had not slept with a man.

Each of the soldiers had taken plunder for himself.

But Moses asked the Gadites and Reubenites, “Shall your brothers go to war while you sit here?

But your servants are equipped for war, and every man will cross over to the battle before the LORD, just as our lord says.”

At that time we captured all his cities and devoted to destruction the people of every city, including women and children. We left no survivors.

We carried off for ourselves only the livestock and the plunder from the cities we captured.

and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.

you must surely put the inhabitants of that city to the sword. Devote to destruction all its people and livestock.

This is how you are to treat all the cities that are far away from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.

When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. You must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them?

When you are encamped against your enemies, then you shall keep yourself from every wicked thing.

At the edge of the sword they devoted to destruction everything in the city—man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.

When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai who had pursued them into the field and wilderness, and when every last one of them had fallen by the sword, all the Israelites returned to Ai and put it to the sword as well.

They captured it and put to the sword its king, all its villages, and all the people. Joshua left no survivors, just as he had done at Eglon; he devoted to destruction Hebron and everyone in it.