Quotes About War

The Germans have national amnesia where the war is concerned.

A Union soldier recalled the Confederate dead along Cemetery Ridge: No words can depict the ghastly picture…the men lay in heaps, the wounded wriggling and groaning under the weight of the dead among whom they were entangled….I could not long endure the gory, ghastly spectacle. I found my head reeling, the tears flowing and my stomach sick at the sight. For months the specter haunted my dreams…

A wounded New Hampshire soldier named Drake had the unpleasant sensation of watching as a hog tore the flesh from the bones of his recently amputated leg. It was eaten up before his eyes. He recalled that he could feel a sharp pain very clearly as it happened

Finally, one would question the absurd idea that anyone would be proud to belong to a race that could create a hellish nightmare like "Gettysburg.

In your country the munitions makers ride in their limousines and prepare their wars, while the workers cannot afford new shoes.

September 20, 1963 The telephone jangled him up from a pleasant dream. Something about the war again, but soft and warm and . . . he could remember no more. He sat up. Marthe was already in the bathroom, and the telephone's harsh clamor made him jerk it off the cradle. "Allo?" "Dr. Cohen," a thick German accent said, "I am from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper in—" "I know.

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl

The war had funneled men and women into familiar channels. Anton's girls were performing their impressions of what girls were supposed to be like.

Military history is the story of the terrible murder of beautiful plans by ugly facts.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

They are often brave, I'm sure, but they are stupid, too, because they give their lives for governments and causes that use their flesh and blood as mere chess pieces. Those governments always betray them or let them down in the long run. Nations neglect no men more shamefully than the heroes of their wars.

MEN WAGE WARS for profit and principle, but they fight them for land and women.

It was pretty depressing. There's a lot of people here who want the war to go on forever, and they don't give a shit who's getting killed or who's doing the killing.

She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble.

I sighed, sure in my own mind that the new war would change nothing: that wars can't really change things. It's peace that makes the deepest cuts, I thought.

There is no man, and no place, without war,' he replied, and it struck me that it was the most profound thing he'd ever said to me. 'The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get—who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.

There is no man, and no place, without war,' he replied, and it struck me that it was the most profound thing he'd ever said to me. 'The only thing we can do is choose a side, and fight. That is the only choice we get—who we fight for, who we fight against. That is life.' 'I … I hope there's more to it than that, brother. But, shit, maybe you're right.

The Sarajevans have a very particular world view - a mordant wit coupled with this unbearable sadness and... truckloads of guts, you know.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.

I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War.