Quotes About War

What I heard from the officers and the generals was, "Kids, this will never end well." Those were the officers I knew, and with some of them I had very close personal contact. None of them were Nazis. They all would say only, "My God, this isn't going to end well.

the next largest source of information about the Holocaust came from foreign radio broadcasts

half of the German population listened to foreign radio broadcasts at some point, but many only after the fall of Stalingrad.

He was a proud young man who had been called up into the SS, and he was in a concentration camp. The young man simply didn't go along, and he was shot as an SS man. And that was also known to us in our town.

news of the atrocities reached a large portion of the German public by the end of the war. A substantial minority of about one-third of the population became aware of the mass murder of Jews while it was still taking place, and most believed this information, especially because it came from persons they trusted.

That is to say that after I had seen all of that, I then wrote, "If there is any God at all, then Germany should never be allowed to win this war.

In general, we had the feeling that we had been attacked and we had to defend ourselves. We even thought that, as Germans, we were invincible. That was the feeling back then.

It is not realistic to put legal constraints on war powers. Law works through general prospective rules that apply to a range of factual situations. International relations and national security are too fluid and unpredictable to be governed by a set of legal propositions that command general assent secured in advance. Laws governing war make us feel more secure but they don't actually make us more secure

It's a fucked-up war when you are more worried about fighting your chain of command than the actual enemy.

the Afghans were well aware of what happened in Iraq during the Gulf War, when the Shiites and Kurds believed the leaflets the Americans dropped urging them to rise up against Saddam Hussein. They did, and the Americans did not come. Saddam's forces had retaliated by massacring the insurgents. "The Afghans in the south fear the same fate—they need to be assured

Clearly the rise of Adolf Hitler and his jack-booted storm troopers to power did not augur well for peace.

By all accounts, the Northern men who leased plantations were "an unsavory lot," attracted by the quick profits seemingly guaranteed in wartime cotton production. In the scramble among army officers illegally engaged in cotton deals and Northern investors seeking to "pluck the golden goose" of the South, the rights of blacks received scant regard.

The war vindicated their conviction, itself a product of the slavery controversy, that freedom stood in greater danger of abridgment from local than national authority (a startling reversal of the founding fathers' belief, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, that centralized power posed the major threat to individual liberties).

She must remain vigilant not only against overt threats—and a fifteen-foot-tall Tzimisce war ghoul was not entirely out of the realm of possibility here, she reminded herself ruefully—but especially against the more subtle dangers: impatience, indulgence, indiscretion. These three deadly sisters would kill as surely, if not as swiftly, as any fiend.

But what factor, or combination of factors, may have caused the famine(s) in the Eastern Mediterranean during these decades remains uncertain. Elements that might be considered include war and plagues of insects, but climate change accompanied by drought is more likely to have turned a once-verdant land into an arid semidesert.

a town partly destroyed by fire and deserted in haste." Here, sometime around or after 1200 BCE, "loose objects were left abandoned in the courtyards and valuables were hidden in the ground. Bronze arrowheads - one of them found stuck in the side of a building - and numerous lead sling bullets scattered all over the place are eloquent proof of war.

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.

Ours was an extraordinary generation, born into a devastated world, exhausted from six years of total war. Sixty million died. Nowadays the young think times are tough if they can't get an Internet connection. They're right; times are tough, but there was a time before it all began to go to shit, when it all really was shit. Our generation was born into that time. It was called World War II.

By this point in the war Lee had become a master at outlining a course of action that was specific enough to obtain the necessary bureaucratic backing but vague enough to allow him maximum flexibility of action once underway.

After the war, Fitz Lee served as governor of Virginia and became one of several former Confederate commanders to return to duty in the U.S. Army for the Spanish-American War.

Ah, war – machine wars. Bullets took them all. The brave and the cowardly, the weak and the fine strong ones like Dannie. And it wasn't the dying that took bravery, then, for cowards could die. It was the living that took bravery – living in that mud and rain and cold and keeping the spirit strong through it all. That was the bravery.

My grandfather was a general in the Nationalist Chinese Air Force during World War II, and I grew up hearing the pilot stories and seeing pictures of him in uniform.

Take all we have, only give us peace'? In God's name…let us at least make one effort; and if we must fall, let us fall like men!