Quotes About War

Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

What I always say is, wars begin in man's time, but they end in God's time.

At the front, people die for their mistakes. Why should politicians be more gently treated? They made the war. They deserve a dozen deaths, each of them. What can we try them for, except for treason, and how can you punish treason, except by death?

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.' You enter into one and it uses up all the money you've got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.

wars begin in man's time, but they end in God's time.

They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor.

Away from the front, where the supply lines ran, there were rest camps and first aid stations, and even patches of farmland. Often at that time of year you could hear skylarks over the fields. Soldiers remarked how strange it was that the birds should be there, but in fact the birds had been there for centuries. The really strange thing was that the soldiers were there.

Now, I know there are many Americans who say, 'Get out of Afghanistan. Bring 'em all home.' And there are others who say, 'Put in hundreds of thousands of more.'

No matter what you think about the Iraq war, there is one thing we can all agree on for the next days - we have to salute the courage and bravery of those who are risking their lives to vote and those brave Iraqi and American soldiers fighting to protect their right to vote.

The first casualty when war comes, is truth

If peace can only come through killing someone, then I don't want it.

Suzuki was standing with his back to me, between the tent and a fireplace they had rigged up by the riverbank. Slowly he turned around, and when he saw me, he came toward me with arms outstretched. "It's Onoda!" he shouted. "Major Taniguchi, it's Onoda!

Major Taniguchi slowly folded up the order, and for the first time I realized that no subterfuge was involved. This was no trick—everything I had heard was real. There was no secret message. The pack became still heavier. We really lost the war! How could they have been so sloppy?

Had the war really ended thirty years ago? If it had, what had Shimada and Kozuka died for? If what was happening was true, wouldn't it have been better if I had died with them?

I was determined to do the best I could at my job and at the same time to have as much fun as possible at that splendid dance hall. If I was lucky, I thought, maybe the war would end; then I would be able to make a lot of money in business. I dreamed of having my own company in China, and to some extent I regarded the evenings at the dance hall as an investment in the future, albeit one that had been financed to a considerable extent by my brother.

On the eighth of December in that year, the war between Japan and the United States began.

But we could not believe that the war had really ended. We thought the enemy was simply forcing prisoners to go along with their trickery. Every time the searchers called out to us, we moved to a different location.

And so the four of us vowed to each other to keep on fighting. It was early April, 1946, and by this time we four made up the only Japanese resistance left on Lubang.

Akatsu finally deserted in September, 1949, four years after the four of us had come together.

The beach at Gontin was unlucky for Shimada. On May 7, 1954, he was killed at a spot only about half a mile from the place where he had been wounded in the leg.

About ten days after Shimada died, a Philippine Air Force plane trailing a streamer behind it passed over several times. It dropped leaflets, and a loudspeaker kept saying, "Onoda, Kozuka, the war has ended." This infuriated us. We wanted to scream out to the obnoxious Americans to stop threatening and cajoling us. We wanted to tell them that if they did not stop treating us like scared rabbits, we would get back at them someday, one way or another.

At this point Squadron Leader Yamaguchi suddenly smiled. "Anyway," he said, "Lubang is a very good island. There aren't many like it anymore. There's always plenty to eat there, Onoda. At least you don't have to worry about that.

If I get killed," I thought, "I'll be enshrined as a god at Yasukuni Shrine, and people will worship me. That isn't so bad.

There are several theories as to why the reappearance of Onoda created such a stir. Mine is that Onoda showed signs of being something that defeat in World War II had deprived Japan of: a genuine war hero.