Quotes About War

No other British city experienced such losses, but throughout the United Kingdom the total of civilian deaths in 1940 and 1941, including those in London, reached 44,652, with another 52,370 injured. Of the dead, 5,626 were children.

William Manchester and Paul Reid's Defender of the Realm, Roy Jenkins's Churchill, and Martin Gilbert's Finest Hour—but then to plunge

After noting that Germany's submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: "For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better

What could a Prime Minister at that time and in such desperate conditions say that was not pathetically inadequate—or even downright dangerous?" To Battersby, it typified "the uniquely unpredictable magic that was Churchill"—his ability to transform "the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain stepping stone to ultimate victory.

The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.

It's not the bombs I'm scared of any more, it's the weariness," wrote a female civil servant in her Mass-Observation diary—"trying to work and concentrate with your eyes sticking out of your head like hat-pins, after being up all night. I'd die in my sleep, happily, if only I could sleep.

Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.

They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality—(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!)

The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility. -Admiral Jacky Fisher of the British Navy

industries' capacity to produce fighter aircraft—Hurricanes and Spitfires—at a rate high enough not just to compensate for the fast-mounting losses but also to increase the overall number of planes available for combat. Fighters alone in no way could win the war

Britain's civil defense experts, fearing a "knock-out blow," predicted that the first aerial attack on London would destroy much if not all of the city and kill two hundred thousand civilians. "It was widely believed that London would be reduced to rubble within minutes of war being declared," wrote one junior official.

But no matter how far Germany advanced or how much more territory it seized, Hitler would not prevail. The might of the British Empire—"nay, in a certain sense, the whole English-speaking world"—was on his trail, "bearing with them the swords of justice.

In 1945 I help liberate Berlin. I was six years in Red Army," Rogov said, his eyes gleaming with the memory.

Because if they grow up holding on to such terrible feelings, it could lead to another war come time in the future when the fate of the country is in their hands.

Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat "atheistic communism.

Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die.

This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn't feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud's explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man's physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die. Each protects himself in his fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.

It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. There is nothing worse than war. Defeat is worse. I do not believe it, Passini said still respectfully. What is defeat? You go home.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.

You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.