Quotes About War

We need to know if the commander in chief is fully with us or not," Mattis said. "We can't fight a half-assed war anymore." In order for the military to succeed, Mattis needed Trump to be all-in on the strategy. "I'm tired of hearing that we have to do this or that to protect our homeland or to ensure our national security," Trump said.

Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States.

In Vietnam today there is a My Lai Museum. Hersh visited it in early 2015 for The New Yorker and noted the names and ages of the victims listed on a marble plaque. The count of the dead is no longer in dispute: a total of 504 people from 247 families; 24 families lost everyone—three generations, no survivors. Included in the 504 were 60 elderly men, and 282 women (17 of whom were pregnant). A total of 173 children were killed; 53 were infants.

Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August

For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war? Secretary Robert Gates

There was a single argument he made, Clapper said, that the North Koreans had not pushed back on during his 2014 visit. The United States, he had argued, has no permanent enemies. Look, he said, we had a war with Japan and Germany but now are friends with both. We had a war with Vietnam but now we are friends. Clapper had recently visited Vietnam. Even after a full-scale war, peaceful coexistence was possible.

I'll just tell you," Mattis said, "the country I would most be willing to fight would be one whose entire officer corps had never heard a shot fired at them. War is so different from training that a shock wave will go through them. I've got—probably 80 percent of my officers have been shot at in one form or another. But I'd prefer not to put them through another war.

Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings responsible to one another and to God.

amounting to a collapse of the Afghan state in months to years.

Mattis was a student of historian Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August about the outbreak of World War I. "He's obsessed with August 1914," one official said, "and the idea that you take actions, military actions, that are seen as prudent planning, and the unintended consequences are you can't get off the war train." A momentum to war builds, "and you just can't stop it.

We did not live the way he wanted us to live and did not obey his teaching. 25So he became very angry with us and brought terrible wars against us. It was as if the people of Israel had fire all around them, but they didn't know what was happening. It was as if they were burning, but they didn't pay any attention.

Quand il mangeait des babas ou des éclairs, il se sentait coupable jusqu'à l'âme, à cause de la guerre, à cause des vendeuses dont les maris ou les amants se trouvaient sans doute quelque part, entre la mer du Nord et les Vosges. Mais il comprenait que Madeleine avait besoin de cette nourriture, justement pour tenir en échec ce vide, ce néant, cette nuit où elle était toujours sur le point de sombrer.

Trudging on foot, loaded with sacks, bundles, and babies, young mothers who had lost their milk, driven out of their minds by the horrors of the journey, abandoned their children, shook the corn out of their sacks onto the ground, and turned back. A quick death, they had decided, was preferable to a slow death by starvation. Better to fall into the clutches of the enemy than to be torn to pieces by some beast in the forest.

I do not believe our gentleman Boy Scout should obsess about combat. I do think he ought to be concerned about combat readiness. A man, however hard he works for peace, must always be ready for war.

The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.

In a war one is either living like a prince or a vagabond. I

Strange stepped outside and immediately he almost walked into Captain Hadley-Bright. I was told you were dead! he cried. I was sure you would be, replied Hadley-Bright. There was a pause. Both men felt faintly embarrassed. The ranks of dead and wounded stretched away upon all sides as far as the eye could see. Simply being alive at that moment seemed, in some indefinable way, ungentlemanly.

Childermass was still there. He had taken his dinner at one of the tables and was now doing the household accounts. As Mr Norrell entered, he looked up and grinned. "I believe Mr Strange will do very well in the war, sir. He has already out-manoeuvred you." On

The idea of forty precious volumes being taken into a country in a state of war where they might get burnt, blown up, drowned or dusty was almost too horrible to contemplate. Mr Norrell did not know a great deal about war, but he suspected that soldiers are not generally your great respecters of books. They might put their dirty fingers on them. They might tear them! They might – horror of horrors! – read them and try the spells! Could soldiers read? Mr Norrell did not know.

In peacetime some sort of introduction is generally required to make a person's acquaintance; in war a small eatable will perform the same office.)

He sported this style in the early war years. Years of uncertainty. When he didn't know if the war was right when it could be said he didn't always know which side he was on not because he was a stupid man but because it was sometimes not 2 different sides at all but one great side surging toward something beyond either Northern or Southern.

The modern world, indeed, has been shaped just as much by war capitalism's death as by its birth.

Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism.

Cambodia is the most heavily mined country on earth, with 4 to 8 million land mines, according to one estimate.