Quotes About War

He saw the sickness of the world and of his own country, during the years after the great war; he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare. STONER

pag.36 You must remeber what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remeber that while tou're trying to decide what to do.

war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.' He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. 'The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has signed his life to build.

Una guerra non solo uccide qualche migliaio, o qualche centinaio di migliaia di giovani. Uccide anche qualcosa dentro le persone, qualcosa che non si può più recuperare. E quando una persona attraversa molte guerre, ben presto si riduce come un bruto, come quella stessa creatura che noi - lei e io, e tutti quelli come noi - abbiamo sollevato dal fango.

I'm not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I'm going to say I'm opposed to war. But I'm also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.

They made a mess of 1914. They came a cropper in 1940. And now they're working up for it again.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

The effort to blur the lines between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib reflects a deep misunderstanding about the different legal regimes that apply to Iraq and the war against al Qaeda.

While Taliban fighters had an initial claim to protection under the conventions, they lost POW status by failing to obey the standards of conduct for legal combatants: wearing uniforms, a responsible command structure, and obeying the laws of war.

I'm just telling you, Tommy. He wasn't supposed to go and do those things in the war that he had to do. People aren't supposed to murder people. And he did, and he did awful things, and awful things happened to him, and he couldn't live inside himself, Tommy. That's what I'm trying to say. Other men could do it, but he couldn't, it ruined him, and—

She could not have predicted, no one can ever predict anything, that they'd have been raised at a time of protests and drugs and a war they seemed to feel no responsibility for. She pictured a dandelion gone by, the white, almost airless pieces of her family scattered so far. The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago. The

Tommy told Pete about what his brother had seen in the war, the women who had walked through the camps, how some had wept and others had looked furious and would not be made to feel bad. "And so there's a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we've done that's hurt other people—that keeps us human.

Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.

But more often than not the missing face has been sucked into the engines of the Nazi death machine, like an unlucky lapwing hitting the propeller of a Lancaster bomber-nothing left but feathers blowing away in the aircraft's wake, as if those warm wings and beating heart had never existed.

More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

Teach your boy to fly, and he will be safe from spears and antique rifles." "I don't want him to go to war at all!" "When it comes, you will have no choice. The only way to save him is to lift him above the crowd.

Swimming up out of the depths was very much like waking that night on the Hansa—a sense of confusion resolving into the certainty of disaster: icebergs, torpedoes, exploded boilers, something beautiful shattered and devoured by the deep, a world consumed by a war that would not end.

Last time I saw her, she was peeking out from one of the bookcases next to the fireplace. She's the first cat I've ever seen trying to pretend she's a condensed version of War and Peace.

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

I don't know why you're crying, Count. I lost closer friends than you when I was deloused!