Quotes About War

Friction thus caused delay and confusion. Action in war became like walking in water, and vision was regularly obscured. "All actions take place in something virtually akin to dusk, which in addition, like fog or moonlight, gives objects an exaggerated size and a grotesque view.

He told his commanders that war could not be "conducted on a green table" and was prepared to delegate authority so that they could respond to situations as they found them rather than how the high command expected them to be. He distrusted generalities and fixed precepts. The important thing was to keep the objective in view while accepting the need for "practical adaptation.

In intellectual and popular culture, war has come to be regarded by many as a peculiar psychosis of Western civilization. This atmosphere of Western self-reproach and neo-Rousseauian nostalgia is prevalent in the views espoused by many postwar anthropologists.

We should draft dogs," he said. "People would say, 'But I love my dog; I wouldn't send him to Vietnam. He might get killed.

The conservatives had started bringing demagoguery to the table on the [Afghan] war issue the previous fall [fall 2006]. Whenever opposition members criticized the war policy, assorted Tories accused them of being disloyal and of failing to support the troops....[Harper] was gaining the reputation of a leader who couldn't see a belt without wanting to hit below it.

And since six o'clock there's been a wounded sniper in the tree by that orchard angle crying "Kamerad! Kamerad!" Just like a big crippled whippoorwhill. What price glory now?

They can see everything they want to, but never forget that they cannot see beyond the distortion of their imagination where there is no color and everything exists in black and white. And that is why we will survive, because they do not have what is necessary to defeat us. The real war is between our imagination and theirs, what we can see and what they are blinded to. Do not despair. None of them can see far enough, and so long as we do not let them violate our imagination we will survive.

After the war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier.

You can't make war against terror. Terror is a technique of battle. It's a tactic that has been employed since time immemorial. You can conduct clandestine action against terrorists, and that must be done.

Those who are not with Mr. Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall -- just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.

Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.

The special gift of that suffering, I have learned, is how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the midst of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold. In this way, anger can teach forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace.

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, your mother,father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend is dead from a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy misson, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet, prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive yyou, war, with arms outstretched

My youth passed at the time of the country's reconstruction from the ruins and ashes of the war in which my nation never bowed to the enemy paying the highest price in the struggle.

We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.

Correct in his later assessment of war in general, Sherman was decidedly incorrect in this statement. The Nez Perce had both just cause and provocation for going to war. The whites were in the process of stealing their ancestral lands and had cheated, robbed, and killed some of them.

But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found—those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes—were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches.

It is interesting to note that the quantum-mechanical revolution was made by a virtually orphaned generation of scientists. Many members of the generation above them had been slaughtered in World War I. There simply weren't many senior scientists around to tell them they were crazy.

Science and faith are not at war. When scientific evidence and biblical teaching are correctly interpreted, they can and do support each other. I'd say to anyone who doubts that: investigate the evidence yourself.

At night they emerge from the water, stalking over the grassy field, leaving bits of themselves on the ground. They gather at my bedside – Bum, Harold, David, the father I'd known before the war, and my neighbor Mr. Lang – and they gaze down on me, whispering revelations of who they were and who I am. And the strongest voice belongs to the German, who looks upon me with concern and warmth, and he tells me, "If you can stand up, you'll live.

In politics and in war, monsters are defined by which side of a fight a man claims. He is still a man to those who share his beliefs, perhaps even a hero. To those that oppose his philosophy, he is a beast, a creature, one of a thousand unspeakable demons clashing over an ideal.