Quotes About War

In an area of more than 1,000 war graves and with birdsong as the only sound, I contemplated the thin margin between life and death. If the sniper's bullet had been just two feet to one side, my father's life would have been over, aged just 27, and I would never have been born.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.

I'm no hero. Heroes don't come back. Survivors return home. Heroes never come home. If anyone thinks I'm a hero, I'm not.

In Bosnia, little children shot in the head by a guy who thinks it's okay to aim his gun at a child.

Everyone thinks my story should be marked by heroism, but there was no risk to myself. You see, no-one in Prague at that time thought they were going to be at war with England.

There's a basis for the war, historically, in the 'Hunger Games,' which would be the third servile war, which was Spartacus' war, where you have a man who is a slave who is then turned into a gladiator who broke out of the gladiator school and led a rebellion and then became the face of the war.

It is the circuit of the great ruinous deed when the name of the seventh is that of the fifth; when the third, even greater, the warlike stranger will take Paris, nor will Provence save her.

During the Gulf War, I remember two little third grade girls saying to me - after I read them some poems by writers in Iraq - 'You know, we never thought about there being children in Iraq before.' And I thought, 'Well those poems did their job, because now they'll think about everything a little bit differently.'

The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.

Thirty years on, I am no longer as certain about anything as I was at age 20. I now regret my support for the war in Iraq and kick myself for the naive expectation that freedom was destined to prevail.

I studied Wilfred Owen for my English A Level, and that led me to Sassoon and Blunden, Rosenberg and Thomas.

I don't believe in God, though I'm not prepared to call myself an atheist either. You know the old phrase: 'There are no atheists in foxholes.' I've never been in a foxhole, and if I ever find myself in a foxhole, I'll let you know if I believe in God or not.

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s - the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.

Each year, about 45 million people are affected by war. Three hundred thousand people die looking down the barrel of a gun - and 200,000 of these are killed in countries ostensibly at peace.

I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10 20 30 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.

And he feels grateful that he has been left with this one substantial relic of all his years of service and thinks how sincerely he has deserved this. Yet he knows the world in which people deserve things or do not deserve them is passing away. Europe is at war. Fairness is now becoming a word without meaning.

So long as any large group of persons, anywhere on this earth, believe the ancient superstition that some Authority is responsible for their welfare, they will set up some image of that Authority and try to obey it. And the result will be poverty and war.

No one who sees the plain fact that all moral and spiritual values of human life are in the individual, can possibly see any spiritual value in war. War comes from the individual's ignorance of his own nature, from his placing responsibility for the moral values of his own life in a fantasy, in a pagan god which he imagines exists outside himself and superior to him and controlling him—an Immortal Italy, a German Race, a Nation, a State.

The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door: It is a questions still worth asking today.

My mother was the perfect Spartan mother. I have always been able to imagine her telling her sons to return from battle 'with their shields, or on them'. She did actually try it on my father at the start of the Second World War. He didn't take it kindly, and confided to me ruefully that he thought she rather fancied herself a Hero's Widow.

Always, in these times, I am wretched save when sleep comes to me. Therefore, I have come to look upon sleep as the best of all gifts." - Helen, about the war

We will never bring peace at the hands of war. As a species we have to rise above it.