Quotes About War

You sang the seas calm, and you drove the Dalriada to war, whatever it took. They know that. That's why they adore you. But everyone needs to laugh in the face of death. They're following an anguissette into battle. Give them credit for seeing the absurdity of it. You've been dwelling on it long enough.

a strange mood settled over the City: proud, defiant, hostile, despairing. All of these things at once. War was coming.

Amid the horrors of war, the poets seldom saw fit to mention the deadly tedium.

War's always the same though—politicians square off and ordinary lads do their dirty work.

I am no longer an artist interested and anxious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn in their lousy souls. —Paul Nash, Artist 1899–1946 Paul Nash served with the Artists' Rifles and the Royal Hampshire Regiment in the Great War.

It makes my heart so heavy. Young men shouldn't have to die, and their parents shouldn't have to go through the rest of their lives making everything seem right by saying, 'At least my boy was brave.' Or, 'We're proud he did his bit.

But there are many men-and women-who do things in a time of war that they wouldn't dream of doing in peacetime, and all for the common good.

In a time of war the supply and movement of money becomes even more crucial than ever. Money is a powerful tool, and wars are about powerful men and how they use the tools at their disposal. The military is involved in a number of ways.

And she wondered if, in going away, in leaving this country, she would expunge that final vapor of the dragon's breath. Oh yes, the dragon. Priscilla had described their memories of war as being like a dragon that lived deep inside. The dragon had to be kept quiet, had to be mollified; otherwise he could breathe fire into the most ordinary of days. If

Grief from the war casts a shadow that at times was dense and at others seemed as pale as a length of gauze, but it was never gone.

A short time ago death was the cruel stranger, the visitor with the flannel footsteps . . . today it is the mad dog in the house. One eats, one drinks beside the dead, one sleeps in the midst of the dying, one laughs and sings in the company of corpses. —GEORGES DUHAMEL, French doctor serving at Verdun in the Great War

It is interesting, Maisie, how a time of war can give a human being purpose. Especially when that purpose, that power, so to speak, is derived from something so essentially evil.

that's why I came back to art, after the war—it's a license to be a bit strange, after all; I sometimes think people expect it, so the fact that I am different doesn't matter.

Yet, despite the pressures of being a sole proprietor, Maisie knew that the curtain of darkness from her past was lifting. Not that she forgot, not that she didn't still have nightmares or close her eyes and see images from the war in stark relief. But it was as if she were on firmer ground, and not at the mercy of memory's quicksand.

My mum didn't date American soldiers during the war, though I think she was amused by them. Of course, you could get a reputation if you went out with American servicemen. It was okay to bring one home if you had family around to keep an eye on you, but a girl wouldn't want to go out with too many of those boys alone.

And I saw the eyes of the gazelle again in France [during WWI], and it struck me that perhaps a heartsick God had looked down and taken up a soul, leaving only the shell of a man." [of those who developed PTSD and/or "war neuroses"]… [In becoming a psychiatrist] I was really trying to create the conditions whereby a soul might be persuaded to join a man's body once a again, thus making him whole.

In my estimation—and I could be taken to task by the authorities for such comments, so please reflect upon this conversation with care—the numbers of shell-shocked men ran into the hundreds of thousands. And, arguably, there is no man"—he held Maisie's eyes with his own—"or woman, who returned from Flanders unscathed in the mind.

No one who wants a peaceful, safe life needs a weapon. Only soldiers at war need guns, and we are not at war. -The White Lady by Jacqueline Winspear

Everything. But in a time of war "everything" seemed to take on a different hue, and keeping loved ones safe meant sacrifices had to be made. Men and women had died making that sacrifice in the hope that their children might live in a free world.

Every war is a war against the child. —Eglantyne Jebb, 1876–1928 Founder of Save the Children, 1919, Jebb drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1924

What is certain, is that war will not leave us as it found us. —WOMAN AT HOME, February 1915

Linni, you have as many answers as you need or are likely to get. Don't ask for more. I learned in the Great War that there are many battles to be fought, and one of the biggest is with the veils that come down around us—with all due respect to that American author, you know, Mr. Steinbeck, I call them the 'drapes of wrath.' They both hide the truth and shield us from the danger behind them.

resembled photographs she had seen of Rudyard Kipling, when the newspapers published photographs of the author and his wife visiting the battlefields of northern France in search of their only son's final resting place.

I am going to talk to you three times a week from a country that is fighting for its life. Inevitably I'm going to get called by that terrifying word "propagandist." But of course I'm a propagandist. Passionately I want my ideas—our ideas—of freedom and justice to survive. Vernon Bartlett, May 28, 1940, during the inaugural broadcast of the British Broadcasting Corporation's North American Service