Quotes About War

What do you think of the war, M. Severn? [...] What can one think of war? I said, tasting the wine again. It was quite good, though nothing in the Web could match my memories of French Bordeaux. War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

I may be oversimplifying, but it does seem to me that, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, and that's a cultural statement as well, which means the kinds of families that have been 'flourishing' in this society for a hundred and fifty years, especially in the white middle classes, have become what they have embraced: consumerism; militant self-interest; and wars to subdue 'natives,' obtain international power, and control various governments.

The important point to understand here is that it is unnecessary, and even misleading, to think of those who engage in large-scale killing of civilians as somehow abnormal. Given the right circumstances, it is not too difficult to turn a significant proportion of humans into mass murderers. The disgust one may feel, the identification with the victims, the sense of unfairness can all be overcome and have routinely been overcome with training and experience.

All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!)

We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

Does all this mean that China and the United States are headed for what Harvard professor Graham Allison called the "Thucydides Trap"? Named for the ancient Athenian military historian, the concept depicts the risk of war arising from the collision between a "dominant" power and a "rising" power.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.

But do I think that our actions in anyway violate the War Powers Resolution, the answer is no.

The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.

The saddest sight these days is the image of hundreds of thousands of children kidnapped and lured into being child soldiers from the age of eight.

The age in which we live can only be characterized as one of barbarism. Our civilization is in the process not only of being militarized, but also being brutalized.

I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.

The misconception that a victory can be worth its price, has in the nuclear age become a total illusion.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

The Iran-Iraq war began the same year that I went to primary school, at the age of six.

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.

Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we know that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

Most people now are looking for a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned from his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no "better place" than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world? That would be easy to bear, if so. If they hated their children and the flowers that grow in the warming light, that would be easy to bear. For then we could hate the haters and be right. What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may love the things that they destroy.

The corporate approach to agriculture or manufacturing or medicine or war increasingly undertakes to help at the risk of harm, sometimes of great harm. And once the risk of harm is appraised as "acceptable," the result often is absurdity: We destroy a village in order to save it; we destroy freedom in order to save it; we destroy the world in order to live in it.

War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.

I had begun my time of waiting. I was living my life, and yet I seemed somehow to be outside of it, as if only when the war was over and Virgil came home would I be able to come back into my life and live again inside it.