Quotes About War

I wish the press were paying more attention to the erosion of the Constitution and the slippery slope that we're getting into, by giving up the right of the Congress to talk about when and how and where we go to war.

I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.

War made my everyday problems seem much smaller, and when it is hard sometimes, I just remember that it could be much worse.

I do not have PTSD, but if I watch part of a movie like 'The Hurt Locker,' or when I spend time around Blackhawk helicopters, I will close my eyes that night and live an entire day in Iraq, flying my missions. I remember the smell and the feel and the heat and everything about it. Then I wake up in Illinois, and I'm exhausted.

I've seen so many women in my family, so many mothers, that have lost children in the war in such absurd ways. I wonder how they do it. How do they keep living? How do they keep smiling?

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

We hid from the Nazis in the mountains. Sometimes there was nothing to eat but snow.

No matter what era you're looking at - war affects things in so many different ways.

I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.

In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke.

The Frenchman may fight for France, but the American fights for mankind, for freedom; for the people, not the land.

If you are not affected, if you are not hurt by what we do, then you will not do anything to stop it. The war will simply continue.

How do you force a man to fight – for freedom? The idiocy of it jarred him.

I tell you, Colonel, we got to win this war. What will happen, do you think, if we lose? Do you think the country will ever get back together again? Doubt it. Would it too deep. The differences. . .If they win there'll be two countries, like France and Germany in Europe, and the border will be armed. Then there'll be a third country in the West, and that one will be the balance of power.

Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. It became a publishing sensation. Lincoln was later wryly to remark to her: 'So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.' The South reacted with fury to her attack on slavery.

It came to him in the night sometimes with a sudden appalling shock that the boys he was fighting were boys he had grown up with. The war had come as a nightmare in which you chose your nightmare side. Once chosen, you put your head down and went on to win.

This is the great battle. Tomorrow or the next day. This will determine the war. Virginia is here, all the South is here. What will you do tomorrow?

The next war in our region will be over the waters of the Nile, not politics," observed Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then Egypt's minister of state for foreign affairs, in 1988.

Before Venus, censorious; before Mars, timid.

In our time the most warlike nations are the most rude and ignorant.

But we must not (as we do every day) give the name of duty to an inward bitter harshness born of self-interested passion, nor that of courage to malicious and treacherous dealings. What they call zeal is their propensity to wickedness and violence: it is not the cause which sets them ablaze but self-interest: they stoke up war not because it is just but because it is war.

You want Paradise, you gotta build it on war, on blood, on envy and naked greed.

The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated...

But it must not be forgotten that 'politics' has been conceived as a continuation, if not exactly and directly of war, at least of the military model as a fundamental means of preventing civil disorder.