Quotes About Conflict

For some reason, all the best matadors were Fascists.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Between pigs and human beings there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever.

In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. (in The Sporting Spirit, Tribune, GB, London, December 1945)

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side.

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last

Perhaps when the next Great War comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.

Who cares?' she said impatiently, 'it's always one bloody war after another, and one knows the news is all lies anyway.

George Orwell

Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

I have no particular love for the idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.

If [pacifists] imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

Sports have nothing to do with fair play. They are bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence

The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.