Quotes About War

I got up alone the next morning in the darkness, and kissed my children good-by as they lay asleep in their beds.... [F]or the first time there was brought home to me a tiny part of that vast human misery summed up under the term of war-time separations. During the next four years, I was destined to see my children only on rare and brief occasions; and it was a loss which no victories, no reparations, no acquisitions of power could ever make good.

Without ever having read Clausewitz—at least as far as we know—the president revived that strategist's great principle that war must be the instrument of politics, rather than the other way around.

The Cold War could have produced a hot war that might have ended human life on the planet. But because the fear of such a war turned out to be greater than all of the differences that separated the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, there was now reason for hope that it would never take place.

4% of the sand on Normandy beaches is made up of tiny metal particles from the D-Day landings.

Whosoever will list himself under the banner of Christ, must, in the first place and above all things, make war upon his own lusts and vices. It is in vain for any man to usurp the name of Christian, without holiness of life, purity of manners, benignity and meekness of spirit.

The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it. The government's very efforts to preserve "morale" fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

To sell war bonds, they had already organized nearly the entire city, all the way down to the level of each block, making each residential block the responsibility of "a logical leader no matter what her nationality"—i.e., an Irishwoman in an Irish neighborhood, an African American woman in an African American neighborhood, and so on. They intended to use that same organization now to distribute everything from medical care to food.

Despite that effort, whoever held power, whether a city government or some private gathering of the locals, they generally failed to keep the community together. They failed because they lost trust. They lost trust because they lied. (San Francisco was a rare exception; its leaders told the truth, and the city responded heroically.) And they lied for the war effort, for the propaganda machine that Wilson had created.

All training for war, for killing, ceased. Now men fought to stop the killing.

In 1918 especially, this question of balance played a crucial role in the war between virus and immune system, and between life and death. The virus was often so efficient at invading the lungs that the immune system had to mount a massive response to it. What was killing young adults a few days after the first symptom was not the virus. The killer was the massive immune response itself.

As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

Getting emotional about things is a peacetime luxury. In wartime, it's much too painful.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

Don't you just hate it when the war on terrorism interferes with political correctness and liberalism's equality fetish?

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.

Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Today, the Iraqi citizen sees that America is coming and wants to occupy his country and kill him, and he is willing to experience for himself what happened in Palestine.

The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.

Grave of the Fireflies is an emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation... It belongs on any list of the greatest war films ever made.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.