Quotes About War

There's no soldier don't have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact.

It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.

But I suspect the reported number of good novels this year is a result of 9/11 and all the other alarums of recent years. I think it set a certain gear into movement, unseen, silent, at the heart of many writers. Writers with children, writers with that hope of a peaceful century; a sort of literary battle stations. I was not surprised to hear Ali Smith describe her wonderful book The Accidental as a war book. Sebastian Barry, in interview with TMO (2005)

three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war. Soon

The atomic bomb brings the men home from every quarter of the earth because the war is not so much over as stunned back into history...

In this makeshift place Willie Dunne discovered a peace of sorts. Yes the wild guns struck their great notes in the distance like the bells of a horrific city. Hearts asleep in the shires of England close upon the sea must heard them too. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone.

The executed men were cursed, and praised, and doubted, and despised, and held to account, and blackened, and wondered at, and mourned, all in a confusion complicated infinitely by the site of war.

Other times you had a rake of our lads killed, and a rake of the old grey-suited devils, and you wouldn't know who had won the fucking thing, sure how could you tell boys?

Al primer tipo responde tal vez Göring, al segundo desde luego Hitler). Pero la auténtica generación del nazismo son los nacidos en la década que va de 1900 a 1910, quienes, totalmente al margen de la realidad del acontecimiento, vivieron la guerra como un gran juego.

The German Reich had to cease to be a state in order to become fully an instrument of conquest.

La noticia «Houben corre los cien metros en 10,6» despertaba exactamente las mismas sensaciones que en su época el titular «Capturados veinte mil rusos», y «Peltzer gana el campeonato inglés y bate el récord mundial» equivalía incluso a acontecimientos que, ¡ay!, jamás habían tenido lugar durante la guerra, como «París conquistada» o «Inglaterra solicita la paz». Yo

Me atrevo a profetizar que ésta será la actitud básica de Alemania tras perder la guerra nazi: el lloriqueo salvaje y testarudo de un niño enfermo que equipara ansioso la pérdida de su muñeco con el fin del mundo.

The truly Nazi generation was formed by those born in the decade from 1900 to 1910, who experienced war as a great game and were untouched by its realities.

the slow approach of the dreaded event; the confusion of the forces opposed to it and their hopeless adherence to the rules of the game, which the enemy daily infringes; the one-sidedness of the contest; the sense of hovering between "peace and stability" and "civil war

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

In the first weeks of October, Citadel fought a two-front war against these enemies. It jettisoned assets that were not part of its main strategies, thus raising capital without telegraphing its distress too obviously.

In war, {freedom's} meaning is bound to the collective, making peace and freedom the same . . . The collective is a mob that suffers in silence, and waits.

This administration misled a nation into war by cherry-picking intelligence and stretching the truth beyond recognition.

In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive.

There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven't the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven't the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.

My men have suffered greatly (from boredom), much blood has been shed (by mosquitoes), and I have swung my ax mightily (chopping firewood). Surely we have earned our place in the annals of history—for never has there been so little war in a war.

I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.