Quotes About War

The soldier talks, guardedly, as some soldiers do,

A so-called antimony war had been waged between French [Galenist] physicians and [alchemical, Paracelsian] iatrochemists since the beginning of the seventeenth century. What it lacked in bloodletting, this war made up for in bile.

Stack 'em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.

Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

The war was still being fought, but this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed.

To Richard, in a sense, Mike was a god. He listened to his older cousin's war stories of rape and killing wide-eyed, fascinated beyond normal curiosity. The photos had a profound effect on Richard. They aroused him sexually in a way far more intense than the girlie magazines his brothers had.

Cousin Mike, the person most people believe put Richard on the path he traveled, died of a massive heart attack in April of 1995. He was overweight and still haunted by the ghosts of things he'd done in Vietnam, regularly using heroin. The Army gave Mike a hero's burial with a twenty-one-gun salute.

condemning a war that, due to college draft deferments, was being fought largely by soldiers drawn from the working class, with blacks a proportionately high percentage.

The incorrigibles . . . still indulge in the swagger which was so customary before and during the war, and still hope for a time when the Southern confederacy will achieve its independence. This class consists mostly of young men, and comprise the loiterers of the towns and the idlers of the country.

the CIA was training Cuban exiles to land in Cuba and launch a guerrilla war against the new government of Fidel Castro.

In Germany's war academies, scenarios were laid out and students were invited to suggest solutions and discuss them collectively. Disagreement was not only permitted, it was expected, and even the instructor's views could be challenged because he "understood himself to be a comrade among others

As he explained to his officers and men, the war against Persia could not be finished until the shah, as the Persians called their king, was mat, or finished. The endgame had to be shah mat, a Persian phrase that would evolve in time into checkmate.

In all of life, but especially in war, the greatest power belongs to fortune. —CAESAR

They saw their injured country's woe; The flaming town, the wasted field; Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; They took the spear, - but left the shield.

1917 (or possibly 1918) poem, 'Greater Love': 'Red lips are not so red/ As the stained stones kissed by the English dead

The absence of war did not mean that the vacuum would necessarily be replaced by peace. In the no man's land between Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe revolted and Britain faced chaos as the civil unrest of wartime spread.

English decadence as a cause of the war, which had first appeared in the war's early months, and had been a commonplace of English war talk since then. The war was to have been the Condy's Fluid that would cleanse society of its decadence;

illegitimate births rose by thirty per cent in Britain during wartime. Where eligible males were lacking, young boys became the objects of older women's affections; prisoners-of-war and 'even unattractive men suddenly found themselves successful and desired by women

The outbreak of war produced the remarkable phenomenon that an unusual number of homosexuals streamed into the army and voluntarily joined the ranks. In this group there were a large number whom public opinion on the subject of homoerotic love in Germany and the fear of Paragraph 175 had driven from their homeland before the war.

There was a surprising apparent enthusiasm for the war among homosexuals, some of whom went to war in the hope 'that a bullet might put an end to their life which they regard as being a complete failure from their point of view of the present conditions and notions.

may have marched to war to ragtime tunes, but few troops could have suspected that among their ranks were men with ballgowns packed in their kitbags

In South Africa he came to the conclusion that the Boer War had been fought for the benefit of Jewish gold and diamond financiers, who were exploiting British imperialism for their own international purposes.