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Quotes About War

we got the judges to agree that the prosecution had to prove beyond doubt that Ender would have won the war without the training we gave him. After that, it was simple. The exigencies of war.
~ Orson Scott Card
Sima nodded. "To lose a soldier is a type of death. A lesser death than the one that will take us all, but a death nonetheless. If we did not feel so, I suppose we would be unfit for command." He turned and faced them. "I have lost upwards of ten thousand since this war began. All of them sons and daughters to me. If we do not stop this gas, this weapon of the enemy, I will lose them all. See to it that I don't.
~ Orson Scott Card
Nobody wants xenocide, but if it happens, I want to make sure it's the other guys that disappear. When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival.
~ Orson Scott Card
You don't represent all humankind. You're about to fight a war with other humans. So how can you say that our wars are evil and your wars are good?' Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa
~ Orson Scott Card
it's for people like that, short-sighted, suicidal people, that we're pushing Ender to the edge of human endurance.' 'I think you underestimate Ender.' 'But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?' 'Sir, those words sound like treason.' 'It was black humor.
~ Orson Scott Card
In our wars with the west," said Lankowski, "we learned to bury everything that we did not want blown up. Individually-targeted bombs were first tested on Arabs, did you know that? The archives are full of pictures of exploding Arabs.
~ Orson Scott Card
the war that will come now is every bit as bloody." "But you delayed it a few more years," said Verily. "What good is that?" "It's two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It's not a small thing, those years.
~ Orson Scott Card
The war on apathy moved much slower than real wars fought on the ground.
~ Orson Scott Card
it was Hitler's mistakes, his weaknesses, his fears, his hatreds, that lost the back half of the war, just as it was his drive, his decisions, that won the front half.
~ Orson Scott Card
We are following with great concern the preparations of the crusaders to launch war on the former capital of Muslims...and to install a puppet government... Fight these despots. I remind you that victory comes only from God. The fighting should be in the name of God only, not in the name of national ideologies nor to seek victory for the ignorant governments that rule all Arab states, including Iraq. [ bin Laden's message: fight the 'crusaders' ]
~ Osama bin Laden
In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.
~ Oscar Wilde
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
~ Oscar Wilde
The essential question that he wanted to ask Freud was if he thought it might be possible to guide the psychological development of humankind so that it became resistant to the psychoses of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilisation from the hovering menace of war.
~ Colum McCann
In 1974, Mahmoud Darwish wrote Yasser Arafat's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations: Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. 346 I repeat: do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.
~ Colum McCann
When he returned from the war he said to Nurit that he wasn't sure that all of him had come home.
~ Colum McCann
the hope that war will end is not chimerical. What was needed was to establish, by common consent, a central authority that would have the last word in every conflict of interest. Beyond that, anything which creates emotional ties between human beings inevitably counteracts war. What had to be sought was a community of feeling, and a mythology of the instincts.
~ Colum McCann
The soldiers called the bullets Lazarus pills: when possible, they could be picked up and used again.
~ Colum McCann
One is so apt nowadays to regard even one's own motives and actions during the War with a contemptuous cynicism that it is as well to remind oneself of emotions which were profoundly and sincerely felt.
~ Compton Mackenzie
He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?
~ Connie Willis
He stepped forward and grasped the staircase's railing, looked up at her earnestly. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? 'He doesn't mean the war,' she thought. 'He's talking about all of it - our lives and history and Shakespear. And the continuum. She smiled down at him. A comedy, my lord.
~ Connie Willis
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
~ Cormac McCarthy
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.
~ Cormac McCarthy
The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Ye'll wake more than the dogs.
~ Cormac McCarthy
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen the horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance. - The judge
~ Cormac McCarthy