Quotes About War

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust. Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?

Inside its crumbling walls the house is riddled with bullet holes, and in its garden only the crimson dahlias still hold their heads high. Jing is lying on a chaise longue [sic] playing with his bird. 'I thought you were in prison.' He looks up, his eyes filled with hate and desire. 'You are my prison.

In time of war, the Devil makes more room in Hell.

His was a lonely, unorthodox conviction that war was man's ultimate failure.

War is the least productive of men's pastimes, and the most indulgent.

If, like the Romans, he must make a desert and call it peace, so be it.

Sharon Kay Penman

As wretched as she was, she wanted Harry to be miserable, too. And yet, she was aware of an underlying sense of sadness. Theirs may have been the first war in which there were no winners, only losers.

War was war and soldiers were the same the world over, although killing came easier to some than others.

Henry nodded, then flinched when the woman began a high, keening wail. I am thankful that we got here in time, he said. I am beholden to God, and two Hugh de Plucknet for not giving up. I know we won a victory here this night. But I am beginning to see, Uncle, that victories in this war are not what they seem. For what have we truly won? The chance to do it all again on the morrow.

even if he'd had the resources to indulge himself, no Welshman could have respected a commander who went to war with feather mattresses and silver plate.

She tried to clear her mind. She knew she needed to return to the war, already in progress.

My family had chosen the army as my career, and war is the army's stock in trade.

As late as World War II, among the 'few of the few' who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter 'Amritsar'.

Loss of life was an accepted gamble that men took when they went to war. But no animal went to war: caught up in man's lethal affairs, they were an irreconcilable aberration.

We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance

the virtue of the whole people.… Nothing is wanting," he declared, "but that their fortitude should equal their bravery to insure the success of our cause. We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling into greater disasters. Our people have only to be true and united, to bear manfully the misfortunes incident to war, and all will come right in the end.

the men of these two outfits fought as if the outcome of the battle, and with it the war, depended on their valor: as indeed perhaps it did, since whoever had possession of this craggy height on the Union left would dominate the whole fishhook position. "The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks," Oates said later.

In war, as in love—indeed, as in all such areas of so-called human endeavor—expectation tended to outrun execution, particularly when the latter was given a head start in the race, and nowhere did this apply more lamentably, at any rate from the Richmond point of view, than in the wake of Chickamauga, probably the greatest and certainly the bloodiest of all the battles won by the South in its fight for the independence it believed to be its birthright.

Books about war were written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way.

But they were all thinking the selfsame thing: I might be a disgrace to my country. I might be a coward, even. But I'm not up there in those woods getting shot at

What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?" R. M. T. Hunter wanted to know.

General Robert E Lee at the Battle of Fredericksburg: It is well that war is so terrible, the gray-bearded general said. "We should grow too fond of it. (p. 37)

Just as war is too important to leave it to the generals, science and technology are too important to leave in the hands of the experts.