Quotes About War

War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs.

He believed that war brought out the true character in a person, good or bad. He had no sympathy for Banks or the others.

It didn't matter what war was fought, coming back home was another battle altogether.

The message was clear. It didn't matter what war was fought, coming back home was another battle altogether. He

El rasgo humano característico no es la conciencia sino el conformismo, y el resultado característico es la guerra religiosa. Otros animales luchan por el territorio o el alimento; los seres humanos, en cambio, son los únicos en el reino animal que luchan por sus creencias.

He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia's body. Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway. And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane.

They talk about adrenaline, but Marder knew it was much more than adrenaline; it was a mystical cocktail that comes only from this one act, from killing men at the risk of yourself dying, a Pleistocene inheritance, disgusting and marvelous at the same time. Sports, even violent sports, were just a pale shadow of this. Why they'd never abolish war.

When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, 'sorry' just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.

That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, 'Colonel, you're insane?' It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines.

We mentioned it later to some people who'd been at the Pacification briefing, someone from the Times and someone from the AP, and they both agreed that the kid from the Big Red One had said more about the Hearts-and-Minds programme than they'd heard in over an hour of statistics, but their bureaus couldn't use his story, they wanted ambassador Komer's. And they got it and you got it.

I hadn't been anywhere, I'd performed half an act; the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly.

I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it

All these wild things go on in the world,' says Pearlstein. 'What happens in the studio, I can control. I can do something constructive in the world. That's a lesson I learned in the army: in war, everything is destruction, so anything else we may do can be a gesture of opposition.

We and our parents and grandparents, our children and grandchildren, are the ones who are sent to manufactured wars where we die. For what? For what we believe to be a righteous cause, never realizing we have been sent to the killing fields by a small group of psychopaths who are motivated only by greed and their lust for power. Because

After the war Avi, by then twenty-two years old, finally decided what he would study: psychology. Had you asked him just then why he picked psychology, "I would say I want to understand the human soul. Not the mind. The soul.

On Wall Street, the lawyers play the same role as medics in war: They come in after the shooting is over to clean up the mess.

Or how his soldiers, even in combat, refused to wear their helmets, claiming that the weather was too hot for them and "if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway." (To which Amos said, "What about all those bullets addressed 'To Whom It May Concern'?")

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

Humans have been doin' awful things to each other throughout history. Humanity's not as great as you make it out to be. I do what needs to be done, and that's that. We're about to go to war, Earl. There ain't no humanity in war.

A Holy War! What better than righteous piety to disguise over-reaching greed?

One evening, after he'd read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. 'Don't it ever stop?' he said. 'I can mind Father telling that there'd be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What's the good in reading, if that's all there is to read about?

Father was always getting into scrapes when he was a lad. But the worst scrape he ever hot hisself into was the war, First World War. And just like with the swallow's eggs, he didn't want to fight anyone. It just happened. This time it was all on account of the horse. See, he didn't go off to the war because he wanted to fight for King and Country like lots of others did. It wasn't like that. He went because his horse went, because Joey went.