Quotes About Civilians

Like most Americans at the time, national leaders did not consider the federal government responsible for the health and well-being of civilians. These were duties of families, churches, charities, and local authorities. As

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

There are no civilians in Japan.

But the death machine had only sampled a vast new source of raw material: the civilians behind the lines. It had not yet evolved equipment efficient to process them, only big guns and clumsy biplane bombers. It had not yet evolved the necessary rationale that old people and women and children are combatants equally with armed and uniformed young men. That is why, despite its sickening squalor and brutality, the Great War looks so innocent to modern eyes.

The few explosions did not seem a miracle of deliverance to the civilians of the enemy cities upon whom the bombs would be dropped.

At the twisted heart of every war were the innocents. "Collateral damage" they called it these days, but those civilians hadn't been collateral, they had been the targets. That was what war had become. It was no longer warrior killing warrior, it was people killing other people. Any people.

Lowther looked shocked. "That would mean it's our policy to kill civilians." "Exactly." "But the government assures us—" "The government lies," Boy said. "And the bomber crews know it. Many of them don't give a damn, of course, but some feel bad. They believe that if we're doing the right thing, then we should say so, and if we're doing the wrong thing we should stop.

Until August the Luftwaffe had raided only ports and airfields. Fitz had explained, in an unusually candid moment, that the British were not so scrupulous: the government had approved bombing of targets in German cities back in May, and all through June and July the RAF had dropped bombs on women and children in their homes. The German public had been enraged by this and demanded retaliation. The Blitz was the result.

The Russians' wanton though often ineffectual attacks on civilians generated a wave of moral outrage all over the world. Typical was the reaction of former U.S. president Herbert Hoover, who denounced the Russian air attacks as a throwback to "the morals and butchery of Genghis Khan.

To this day I don't know if he was struggling with the moral implications of gunning down half a dozen civilians, or if he was mentally counting to see if he had that many shells left in the gun.

Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians.

Military guys are rarely as smart as they think they are, and they've never gotten over the fact that civilians run the military.

A terrible and hidden reality of both America's and Israel's wars is that hundreds of soldiers have fallen, killed by terrorists, because they were being cautious with civilian lives

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

We are at war to liberate Iraq, to protect the people of the United States and other countries from the devastating impact of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists or the Iraqi government to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

The 'SAMS' study, titled 'A New Normal: Ongoing Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria', reveals that the Assad regime merely switched from sarin gas to chlorine gas in its bombardment of civilians areas.

There were 2 million civilians in Mosul and 2,000 kidnapped girls there. There were thousands of families in Mosul that could have helped other girls, but they didn't. Women had to wear veils in Mosul. It would have been easy to smuggle Yazidi women out.

The military is a discrete entity. Then they come back, and they're such a small percentage of the population, and they can't really - it's hard for them to talk to civilians.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I don't give a damn. to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on civilian casualties in Vietnam

Civilians are like beans; you buy 'em as needed for any job which merely requires skill and savvy. But you can't buy fighting spirit.

A Vietnam Memorial's worth of civilians in an instantaneous flash. . . . When the crew of the Enola Gay landed, they celebrated with a barbeque.

With the indiscriminate nature of modern military technology (no such thing as a "smart bomb," it turns out) all wars are wars against civilians, and are therefore inherently immoral. This is true even when a war is considered "just," because it is fought against a tyrant, against an aggressor, to correct a stolen boundary.

The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin---about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;