Quotes About War

As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion - usually both at the same time - as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife.

anything that says Yes to life is automatically saying No to war.

Don't you see? The enemy represents Death to 'em. The government propaganda mills paint the enemy as an unfeelin', devourin' monster. So, when we go to war we go on a noble mission, a life-affirming mission, whose object is the destruction o' death. And 'tis precisely because we hate death so much that we're too crazed and irrational to see the irony in it. We hate death so bloody much that we will kill — and die — in order to try to halt its march.

As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion—usually both at the same time—as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife.

There's a direct link between the buffalo hunts and Vietnam," said Switters.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.

My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

The two oldest fought in the First World War, the rest battled in the Second. They knew about Korea but not understanding what it was about didn't give it the respect—the seriousness—Frank thought it deserved. The veterans ranked battles and wars according to loss numbers: three thousand at this place, sixty thousand in the trenches, twelve thousand at another. The more killed, the braver the warriors, not the stupider the commanders.

Other than outwitting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems to be nothing for the inhabitants of paradise to do.

Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

We are being seduced into accepting truncated, short-term, CEO versions of the world's wholly human race. The loudest voices are urging those already living in day-to-day dread to think of the future in military terms—as a cause for and expression of war. We are being bullied into understanding the human project as a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral.

Rick Starmover and Hal Sono in Space Wars: The Return.

Whereas, Slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable War of one portion of its citizens upon another portion," the preamble began, "WE, CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES, AND THE OPPRESSED PEOPLE … ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH FOR OURSELVES, THE FOLLOWING PROVISIONAL CONSTITUTION." Brown's

In principle, rememberance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860's. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in s grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

This may sound sexist,' Joslyn said, 'but my theory is that men like the Civil War because it's an action story, they're caught up in the battlefield drama. The prisoners are an emotional side of the War. Women are attracted to all that raw feeling, we understand it better....

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal eral state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.

War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in pursuit of peace? There was no convincing answer.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another.

The solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by 'doing their own thing', 'letting it all hang out' and 'making love, not war'—was always an illusion, and it has not worn well. But it was not the only illusion of the time, and by no means the most foolish.

At the core of anti-Fascist rhetoric as deployed by the official Left was a simple binary view of political allegiance: we are what they are not. They (the Fascists, Nazis, Franco-ists, Nationalists) are Right, we are Left. They are reactionary, we are Progressive. They stand for War, we stand for Peace. They are the forces of Evil, we are on the side of Good. In the words of Klaus Mann, in Paris in 1935: whatever Fascism is, we are not and we are against

Poles died in World War II; proportionately lower than the death rate in parts of Ukraine or among Jews, but a terrible figure notwithstanding. Yet there was a difference. For Poles, it was difficult to survive under German occupation, but in principle you could. For Jews it was possible to survive under German occupation—but in principle you could not.

Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of the interwar years had clearly revealed the inability of capitalists to protect their own best interests, the liberal state would have to do it for them whether they liked it or not.