Quotes About War

The very fact that he could and did see no paradox in the fact that he took an active part in a partisan war and on the very side whose principles opposed to his own, was proof enough that he was two separate and complete people, one of whom dwelled by serene rules in a world where reality did not exist.

old General Compson had gone to his fathers at last—or to whatever bivouac old soldiers of that war, blue or gray either, probably insisted on going to since probably no place would suit them for anything resembling a permanent stay —

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless; someone will always buy him drink or weapons.

It wasn't we who invented war,' the group commander said. 'It was war which created us. From the loins of man's furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.

Folks don't go to wars for fun. A man don't leave his maw crying just for fun.

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab...

History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool

You're too young to remember it," Verity's mother said, "but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.

You saw a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.

I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon.

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Bit by bit [the Second World War] really changed my view of what people were capable of, and therefore what human nature was.

The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.

Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society... but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another... I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.

Fool! cried the hunchback. You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

At 8:23 there seemed every chance of a lasting alliance starting between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two nations were very close to war.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

In any case, the two countries had stayed alive over the centuries mainly by warring on each other. There had been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy, which almost bankrupted both nations, the Roman Rift, which did send them both into insolvency, only to be followed by the Discord of the Emeralds, in which they both got rich again, chiefly by banding together for a brief period and robbing everybody within sailing distance.

A Princeton student being interviewed by a reporter was questioned about the prospect of American troops going to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded there. "There's nothing worth dying for," was her response. Which means of course that one day she shall have the unpleasant task of dying for nothing.

Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves.

The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

The movies, once the nation's happy diversion, had become a scapegoat for those who were frightened by the changes rocking American society since the end of the war.

Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.