Quotes About War

Allen left the academy, graduated from Catholic University, and took a commission in 1912. Wounded at Saint-Mihiel in 1918 and carried from the field on a stretcher, he regained consciousness, ripped off the first-aid tag, and dashed back to rally his men. The next bullet drilled him through the jaw, right to left, but not before he had broken his fist on a German machine-gunner's head.

Few commanders in this war could function without arriving at a sensibility in which thousands of dead and wounded men could be waved away as "insignificant.

How I want the war to end," wrote one soldier. "The danger now begins to frighten me. To die at this stage—with the door at the end of the passage, the door into the rose garden, already in sight, ajar—would be awful.

When the trucks halted for a moment and GIs tumbled out to urinate in squirming echelons on the road shoulders, civilians rushed up to plead for cigarettes with two fingers pressed to the lips, a gesture described by Forrest Pogue as the French national salute.

Every house seemed to display a crucifix or Christian texts over the bedsteads; some flew Allied flags, or posted signs claiming that the occupants were Dutch or Belgian, and never mind that discolored patch of wallpaper where the Führer's portrait had hung until the day before. "No one is a Nazi. No one ever was," Gellhorn wrote. "It would sound better if it were set to music. Then the Germans could sing this refrain.

Derrien had issued his battle cry, he annulled it by order of Vichy. "November 8, we fight everybody," he wrote privately. "November 9, we fight the Germans. November 10, we fight nobody. November 10 (noon), we fight the Germans. November 11 (night), we fight nobody." Perhaps no passage written during the war better captured the agony of France and the moral gyrations to which her sons were subject.

September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.

Like any army moving from war to peace, this Army was entering a period in which it would search high and low for its soul. Only the vanquished truly learn anything from the last war, according to an ancient maxim, and the issue now confronting America was whether the defeated nation and the nation's vanquished Army would learn anything from Vietnam.

Brittany reflected an inflexible adherence to the OVERLORD plan. "We must take Brest in order to maintain the illusion of the fact that the U.S. Army cannot be beaten," Bradley told Patton, who agreed. The war ended with not a single cargo ship or troopship having berthed at Brest, which bombs and a half million American shells knocked to rubble.

I don't know anything about wars. I don't think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it.

Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003.

We are at war with the wicked: rapists, murderers, home-invaders, and robbers. There are no bystanders - only victims.

I believe if you're going to bomb someone you should know them first. It should hurt when you kill someone.

Europe's reluctance to go to war frustrates some Americans. I believe their relative pacifism is because Europeans know the reality of war, while most Americans do not. …. It's easier to feel detached when a war is something you watch on the nightly news, rather than something that killed your grandfather or destroyed your hometown.

So I would say God hates war, but God loves every soldier.

During war times not only one should himself take part in it but also encourage the courageous to do so by creating awareness, zeal and enthusiasm for the war in the society.

For about two minutes, Ingo and I weighed the idea of transferring M*A*S*H from Korea to Vietnam. But the current war was just too close for us to be funny or properly irreverent about it. By keeping our story at a safe distance in years and miles, we could safely look askance at an American military adventure in Asia, and let people draw their own parallels.

I mean, I was born the day war broke out, but I don't remember all the bombs though they did actually break up Liverpool, you know. I remember when I was a little older, there was big gaps in all the streets where houses used to be. We used to play over them.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.

People marvel that we're not out in the streets, decking the monstrous, khaki tanks with roses and jasmine. They wonder why we don't crown the hard, ugly helmets of the troops with wreaths of laurel. They question why we mourn our dead instead of gratefully offering them as sacrifices to the Gods of Democracy and Liberty. They wonder why we're bitter.

No anti-slavery crusader aimed for a partial solution or settled on a regimen of interim targets. The fight to end slavery was a fight to end 100 percent of slavery for all time. In just that way, we can't settle for partial measures if we are going to win the war for our world. We need to fight for 100 percent sustainability, now.

We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshiped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us.

Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back.

T]he forcing of any special brand of freedom and democracy on a people, whether they want it or not, by the brute force of war will be a denial of those very democratic principles which we are striving to advance.