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Quotes About War

War is less burdensome than servitude.
~ Vauvenargues
Let him who desires peace prepare for war.
~ Unknown
It is quite impossible to understand,' I commented afterwards, 'how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure.
~ Vera Brittain
It is impossible," I concluded, "to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilization.
~ Vera Brittain
Between 1914 and 1919 young men and women, disastrously pure in heart and unsuspicious of elderly self-interest and cynical exploitation, were continually re-dedicating themselves - as I did that morning in Boulogne - to an end that they believed, and went on trying to believe, lofty and ideal.
~ Vera Brittain
It seems delightfully incongruous,' he wrote from Armentie'res, 'that there should be good shops and fine buildings and comfortable beds less than half an hour's walk from the trenches
~ Vera Brittain
When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
~ Vera Brittain
For me, as for all the world, the War was a tragedy and a vast stupidity, a waste of youth and of time; it betrayed my faith, mocked my love, and irremediably spoilt my career.
~ Vera Brittain
Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
~ Vera Brittain
Love, for her, was something to be gloried in and acknowledged; like so many others, she had not seen enough of the War at first hand to realise how quickly romance was being replaced by bitterness and pessimism in all the young lovers whom 1914 had caught at the end of their teens.
~ Vera Brittain
I joined the Pass Mods. class and studied the cyropaedia and Livy's Wars with a resentful feeling that there was quite enough war in the world without having to read about it in Latin
~ Vera Brittain
The War has little enough to its credit, but it did break the tradition that venereal disease or sexual brutality in a husband was amply compensated by an elegant bank-balance.
~ Vera Brittain
knowledge that men deliberately refused to perceive the obvious even when such perception was to their own advantage. Still optimistic in spite of the War, I had believed that statesmen needed only to realise the mistakes of the past in order to avoid them, only
~ Vera Brittain
Ik besefte nog niet (...) dat alleen een proces van volledige aanpassing, het uitwissen van smaak, talent en zelfs herinneringen, het leven draaglijk maakte voor iemand die oog in oog stond met de allerergste aspecten van een oorlog.
~ Vera Brittain
Het gedreun van de kanonnen in de verte was eerder te voelen dan te horen; nu en dan trok er een rilling door de aarde, was er een vibratie die werd meegevoerd door de wind, terwijl ik op dat moment niets hoorde.
~ Vera Brittain
I do not believe that a League of Nations, or a Kellog Pact, or any Disarmamnt Conference, will ever rescue our poor remnant of civilisation from the threatening forces of destruction, until we can somehow impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through thunder-clouds, from time to time glorifies war.
~ Vera Brittain
and suddenly it was all 'Lord of the Flies' meets the Battle for Helm's Deep.
~ Vera Nazarian
If the police knew anything they would understand that there is a huge political power play in action. And they are not going to be immune. If they think that by beating up a few brave, old ladies they will be able to win themselves a place at the table when the Global Reset is put into place then they are seriously deluded. They are merely fodder in a war they don't understand.
~ Unknown
you've worked out the numbers. To do that we'd essentially have to re-create the sun. Do you have any idea of the energy involved? I remember what it took to support our diggers after Dark during the War. We used more fuel in
~ Vernor Vinge
Though he had always thought logging elephants had a good life, he found himself now pining for them to have something better. The war sometimes made men harder and softer at the same time. Even with this reassuring
~ Unknown
Unfortunately, by then, he had already seen the last of his beloved elephant Bandoola. The great tusker had been killed before war's end, in circumstances that would haunt Williams for the rest of his life. It was, he would always maintain, nothing short of murder
~ Unknown
All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war they make it tour the world.
~ Victor Cousin
But wars—or the threat of war—at least put an end to American chattel slavery, Nazism, Fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet Communism. It is hard to think of any democracy—Afghan, American, Athenian, contemporary German, Iraqi, Italian, Japanese, ancient Theban—that was not an outcome of armed struggle and war.
~ Victor Davis Hanson
Again, wars do not really end until the conditions that started them--a bellicose government, an aggressive leader, a national policy of brinksmanship--are eliminated. Otherwise, there remains a bellum interruptum , much like the so-called Peace of Nicias, when Athens and Sparta agreed to a time-out in 421 B.C., before going at each other with renewed and deadly fury in 415 B.C.
~ Victor Davis Hanson