Quotes About War

In time of war, if you go through a bad neighborhood, I don't want a little French poodle, I want a Rottweiler on my hands.

We are sick of war, we don't want to fight, And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.

There can be no peace with someone who wants to kill you.

No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he's got the fridge full of sausages and spring water.

World War II, the atomic bomb, the Cold War, made it hard for Americans to continue their optimism.

When Hitler declared war on the United States, he was betting that German soldiers, raised up in the Hitler Youth, would always out fight American soldiers, brought up in the Boy Scouts. He lost that bet. The Boy Scouts had been taught how to figure their way out of their own problems.

I came to know and like some Germans later on. But I hated the enemy then for what they tried to do to Johnnie Cock and what they did to Johnnie Dewar, our squadron leader, later in the battle. He parachuted out, but when we found his body, it was riddled with bullets. Some of our people say what wonderful men the German pilots were personally. But I still feel that men who could shoot boys in parachutes are not people I want to know.14

Later in the war, I flew in the Middle East over desert. You'd look down and there was a lot of sand. It meant nothing to me. But flying over Kent and Surrey and the green fields of southern England and the Thames Estuary – that was home. The fact that someone was trying to take it away or break it up made you angry.30 Who the Hell do these Huns think they are flying like this over OUR country in their bloody bombers covered with Iron Crosses and Swastikas?31

Eagle had indeed revealed what Churchill, no less, was to characterise as the essence of war: 'a catalogue of mistakes and misfortunes'6.

it is these miracles of execution," Clausewitz writes, "that we should really admire."9 The fact is that in war "things do not happen of their own accord like a well-oiled machine, indeed the machine itself starts to create resistance, and overcoming it demands enormous willpower on the part of the leader."10 In war, "everything is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult… taking action in war is movement in a resistant medium."11

One is to ensure that the war fighters and the intelligence analysts get the information that they need when they need it, in a format that's useful to them.

The impulse to eschew the unpleasant leads to avoidance; avoidance leads to aversion; aversion leads to fear; fear leads to hatred; hatred leads to aggression. Unwittingly, the oh-so-natural instinct to avoid the unpleasant becomes the root of hatred. It leads to war: war within, war without. Entertaining aversion is a slippery slope.

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.Because your lover threw wild hands toward the skyAnd the affrighted steed ran on alone,Do not weep.War is kind.

They were going to look at war, the red animal--war, the blood-swollen god.

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' No,'" I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace...

Ronald Spiers: The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.

No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.

When a man was hit hard enough for evacuation, he was usually very happy, and we were happy for him—he had a ticket out to the hospital, or even a ticket home—alive. "When a man was killed—he looked 'so peaceful.' His suffering was over.

On the justification for the war, it wasn't related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction.

The worst moment was always taps. It didn't matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much.

What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good.

The present assault upon capital is but the beginning. It will be but the stepping-stone to others, larger and more sweeping, till out political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, - a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.

He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, "willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.