logo

Quotes About War

Every full grown emperor requires at least one war, otherwise he would not become famous.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Die Schwierigkeit mit dem Krieg ist, dass die Leute, die ihn wollen, nicht erwarten, in ihm zu sterben. Und die Schwierigkeit mit unserer Erinnerung ist, dass sie vergisst und verändert und verfälscht, um zu überleben. Sie macht den Tod zu einem Abenteuer, wenn der Tod dich verfehlt. Aber der Tod ist kein Abenteuer: Töten ist der Sinn des Krieges, - nicht Überleben.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers—is that the reason why wars perpetually recur?
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Üçümüz de ayn? ÅŸeyi düÅŸünüyoruz: Franz Kemmerich buradan saÄŸ ç?ksa bile tek bacakl? kalaca??na göre bu çizmeler ne iÅŸe yarar?
~ Erich Maria Remarque
He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Hai ragione: non siamo più giovani, non ci interessa più dare l'assalto al mondo. Siamo dei profughi, fuggiamo da noi stessi. Avevamo diciott'anni, e cominciavamo ad amare il mondo e l'esistenza: ci hanno costretti a spararle contro. La prima granata ci ha colpiti al cuore. Siamo esclusi ormai dall'attività, dal lavoro, dal progresso, non ci crediamo più. Crediamo alla guerra.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Kat and I, two soldiers in shabby battledress, roasting a goose in the middle of the night. We don't talk much, but we have a greater and more gentle consideration for each other than I should think even lovers do. We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
I know nothing about them except that they are prisoners-of-war, and that is precisely what shakes me. Their lives are anonymous and blameless; if I knew more about them, what they are called, how they live, what their hopes and fears are, then my feelings might have a focus and could turn into sympathy. But at the moment all I sense in them is the pain of the dumb animal, the fearful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men. - Paul Buemer
~ Erich Maria Remarque
I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?
~ Erich Maria Remarque
When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again - sometimes for ever.
~ Erich Marie Remarque
I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though death himself lies in it, (Chapter 4, All Quiet on the Western Front)
~ Erich Remarque
The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. "It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour," he said. "It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.
~ Erik Larson
the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.
~ Erik Larson
In conclusion," he said, "one may safely say that it would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse." To fail to learn from such "blunders of the past," he said, was to end up on a course toward "another war and chaos.
~ Erik Larson
that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.
~ Erik Larson
We were still looking upon war in the light of Victorian and previous wars," Morton wrote later, adding that he and his brother had failed to appreciate that the "nature and method of war had changed for all time in August 1914 and that no war in the future would exclude anybody, civilians, men, women or children.
~ Erik Larson
From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.
~ Erik Larson
The essence of war is violence," he wrote, "and moderation in war is imbecility.
~ Erik Larson
It instructed Germany's ambassador in Mexico to offer Mexican president Venustiano Carranza an alliance, to take effect if the new submarine campaign drew America into the war. "Make war together," Zimmermann proposed. "Make peace together." In return, Germany would take measures to help Mexico seize previously held lands—"lost territory"—in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
~ Erik Larson
Once, at the dawn of a very dark time, an American father and daughter found themselves suddenly transported from their snug home in Chicago to the heart of Hitler's Berlin. They remained there for four and a half years, but it is their first year that is the subject of the story to follow, for it coincided with Hitler's ascent from chancellor to absolute tyrant, when everything hung in the balance
~ Erik Larson
Dodd could not grasp how these things could be occurring in the Germany he had known and loved as a young scholar in Leipzig.
~ Erik Larson
He told Hitler, "There is evident injustice in the French attitude; but defeat in war is always followed by injustice." He raised the example of the aftermath of the American Civil War and the North's "terrible" treatment of the South.
~ Erik Larson