Quotes About War

Many of them couldn't fathom how Germany could have lost this war against the world, and they kept speculating about conspiracies and malicious forces that had brought about the shame of their defeat.

But I thought: That is the sound of war. That sound of a steady, grinding machine made me think of guns; and then I thought of the crazed and half-starved village people against whom the guns were going to be used, people whose rags were already the colour of ashes. This was the anxiety of a moment of wakefulness; I fell asleep again. When

the brutality and barbarism of those dying years of the twentieth century in that corner of the Balkans. The Second World War was supposed to have put an end to that sort of savagery in Europe; Kosovo had been the worst kind of wake-up call to remind everyone how thin was the skin of civilised behaviour.

Thousands of people are being buried and no one attends the funerals,' said one of the soldiers. 'In peacetime it's the other way round: one coffin and a hundred people carrying flowers.

Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.

Grossman, perhaps tiring slightly of journalism, seems to have longed to convey his thoughts and feelings about the war in fictional form. At this stage, when the Soviet Union was fighting for its life, his ideas were very close to that of the Party line. It was only at Stalingrad, a year later, that his view of the Stalinist regime began to change. This outline, may well have formed part of the idea for The People Immortal, his novel written and published the following year...

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

the world of the human soul suddenly seemed so vast as to make even the raging war seen insignificant.

I had been imagining what war was like - everything on fire, children crying, cats running about, and when we got to Stalingrad it really turned out to be like that, only more terrible.

There is one right even more important than the right to send men to their deaths without thinking: the right to think twice before you send men to their death.

The intuition of a deafened and isolated soldier often turns out to be nearer the truth than judgements delivered by staff officers as they study the map.

Quando gli chiedevano perché si inerpicasse sulle macerie e cantasse a rischio della vita, Zubarev si limitava ad allargare le braccia. Forse voleva dimostrare non solo a se stesso e ai suoi compagni, ma anche al nemico, che chi distrugge deve comunque arrendersi di fronte alla bellezza della vita anche là dove il lezzo di cadavere ristagna giorno e notte.

Life was terrible. It was as though they could understand, as though they could read in one another's eyes, that the power which had ground them into the mud would continue – even after the war – to oppress both conquered and conquerors.

Yet it is hard to find many wars that have resulted from miscommunications or misunderstandings. Far more often they break out because of malevolent intent and the absence of deterrence, or because a prior war ended without a clear resolution or without settling disagreements—in a manner of Rome's first two wars with Carthage. Again, Margaret Atwood was empirical when she wrote in her poem, "Wars happen because the ones who start them / think they can win.

Prewar education, reputation, influence, and rank matter little when the enemy is gaining ground and very few know how to turn him back.

After fighting for four long years, we were completely surprised by the Soviets' efforts to absorb Eastern Europe, and their rejection of almost all wartime assurances of elections to come.

Despite the far greater carnage between 1939 and 1945, seventy years later historians rarely write of the political or strategic futility of the Second World War as they so often do of the First. Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.

The war no longer pits radicals against conservatives, but often socialists and anarchists against both liberals and conservatives.

When you're in war, you don't have to be perfect to be good, you just have to be 51% better than the enemy if you want a moral edge. We in the West have this Utopian idea that we have to be 99.9% good, and if we're not, then we're no damned good. And the enemy knows that.

Nicholas Monsarrat's epic postwar novel of the Battle of the Atlantic, The Cruel Sea, is a quite different, nightmarish elemental story of men at sea amid

Apparently, losing sixty million for a subsequent general seventy-year peace and the end of nightmarish ideologies was defensible, while losing fifteen to twenty million for a twenty-one-year hiatus was sometimes not.

The system rather than the man was what would win the war.

There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.

At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.