Quotes About War

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

I opened a newspaper this morning: a bishop was sounding off about "the shame of the German". Why doesn't anyone write a piece on "the shame of the Englishman"?---the ordinary hard-working Englishman, who since the war has had to watch his property and income vanishing like so much smoke?

Bullets sound like hornets when they pass too close to your head. After a while, the world closes down. You can't hear much, you can't see much, just the way ahead, the next slat, the next open gate. All you know is running; the only place that's real is away.

But the main thing I learned from the war was that war is unjust, no matter who is pulling the trigger, and that, as my parents taught me, we owe it to each other as human beings to speak out against injustice.

Peace can happen in 24 hours....just like war can happen in 24 hours.

whether it's the bitter treasury of folk wisdom or sweet adages and dicta, whether it's the dust of the bedamned or the dismay of the beloved, the sacks of bums or Judas's sums, whether it's movement from or standing by, the lies of the defrauded or the truths of the defamed, whether war or peace, whether stages or studios, taints or torments, whether darkness or light, hatred or pity, in life and beyond it—whether it's any of these, or anything else, you have to make good sense of it.

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever -- money, for instance, or war.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Child, all books are magic. Just think,' he said, 'about what books make people do. People go to war on the basis of what they read in books. They believe in "facts" just because they are written down. They decide to adopt political systems, to travel to one place rather than another, to give up their job and go on a great adventure, to love or to hate. All books have tremendous power. And power is magic.' 'But are these books really magic...?

what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.

It seems to me that we are rather in the position of the hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before they had killed it. I personally cannot foresee the situation in which we may find ourselves at the end of the war, and I therefore think that any discussion at the present time of how we are going to cut up the Turkish Empire is chiefly of academic interest. BRITISH GENERAL GEORGE MACDONOGH, DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE, JANUARY 7, 1916

Burke was also gripped by a more generalized melancholy, one familiar to many who return from war, but which can't be easily explained to civilians, let alone to home-front loved ones. Along with its horrors, war is thrilling, exhilarating, it propels the prosaic concerns and nagging chores of everyday life into inconsequence.

Anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn has noted the following: Every culture has a concept of murder, distinguishing this from execution, killing in war and other justifiable homicides. The notions of incest and other regulations upon sexual behavior, the prohibitions on untruth under defined circumstances, of restitution and reciprocity, of mutual obligations between parents and children—these and many other moral concepts are altogether universal.17

War is the true Nature of the world, a dog with matted fur lapping eagerly at the bloody Niles, wagging its threadbare tail the entire time.

I'll be damned if my family, uncles, cousins fought, bled, sacrificed all on foreign beaches to free millions of people being tortured and killed by insane genocidal fascists AS WELL AS trying to keep the rest of the world safe from these evil monsters, only to find some decades later, flags bearing Swastikas being planted in American soil, if not eventually American political buildings and agencies!

when men and women of arms have bled to secure a time of peace, the very people who most benefit from that peace are also the most likely to forget the bleeding.

So now we've got Requin thinking that Stragos is out to get him. I've never helped precipitate a civil war before. This should be fun.

Your moral education's over." Jean stared up into the sky as the dockside receded and Bug took them out into the canal's heart. "Now you're going to learn a thing or two about war.

Surely, your readings must have taught you that when men and women of arms have bled to secure a time of peace, the very people who most benefit from that peace are also the most likely to forget the bleeding.

46. In 1918 a World War One homing pigeon named Cher Ami saved 194 American soldiers lives by continuing her journey after losing an eye, a leg and after having been shot through the chest.

Soviet diplomat Vyacheslav Molotov is thought to be the only man to ever shake hands with Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Roosevelt, and Churchill and is also the inspiration behind the term Molotov cocktail.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.

compassion and humanity are the first casualties of any war.

Glory and honor were found as much in defeat as in victory. Maybe more so, when the war was senseless and never-ending.