Quotes About War

We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war.

Not surprisingly, there's nothing to do at the Pentagon except start a war. Tourist aren't even allowed to take photos with the building in the background, so when the sailor-suited family of Navy veterans four generations deep handed me a disposable camera and asked me to follow at a distance and secretly take photos of them while they snapped to attention, saluted, and flashed peace signs for no apparent reason, I was only too happy to serve my country.

In April of 1945, in the Dachau concentration camp, several men were lined up against the wall, tortured, and shot. Such savagery was typical for Dachau. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been murdered there, through starvation, execution, the gas chamber, and even grotesque medical experiments. But this incident happened after the camp had been liberated. The victims were captured German soldiers, and it was the American liberators who were doing the killing.

But war's appeal is more than belonging, morality, and signaling. As Chris Hedges put it in the title of one of his books, "War is a force that gives us meaning." PERHAPS THE TWO examples so far have left you cold. Maybe you don't want to climb mountains or go to war. But what about having children?

Her attention drifted as a roaring filled her ears. Smoke was the smell of battle for all of history, smoke and blood and fear. I wonder how real it is to the masses on Earth who rely on us to keep them safe? The entire concept of war for most of the twenty billion Flatlanders was formed by thirty-second holocasts broadcast to their homes after dinner, smoke free.

Were we to be engaged in a war . . we should become absolutely destitute of elephants. . .What would our children do without elephants to amuse them? What would the sick do without the sight of elephants to invigorate them?

And to make things worse we started mixing religion with politics. An old argument just like the Crusades. Our God is better than your god. 'God Is with Us' on the Nazi belt buckles. Holy Wars against women and children, Catholics killing Protestants in Belfast. We went into Iraq for the wrong reasons and we left our friends behind. More people have been killed in the name of God and so-called 'faith-based values' than for any other reason.

Buying almost up to America's entrance into the war in December 1942, the New York division shipped out the last purchases within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This war is a battle for the control of your heart, and whatever functionally rules your heart will then shape the way you see life and your desires, and it will control your words and behavior.

The war that rages in all our hearts is a war between the awe of God and the awe of self. The war really does somehow turn all of us into glory thieves. Perhaps we commit vertical larceny much more than we realize. Perhaps we quest for personal glory more than we think. Perhaps we take credit for what only God can do more often than we think we do. Perhaps, in subtle idolatry, we give credit to places and things when it really belongs to God.

But here is the reality: all of the horizontal battles are the fruit of a deeper war. The most important war, the one that needs to be won, is not the war they are having with each other, but a war that wages within them individually. Real change is all about winning this war.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.

If truth is the main casualty in war, ambiguity is another.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

The day after the British entered the war Henry James wrote a friend: The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness... is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.So many dreams lost in the madness that had engulfed us.Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent, trying to comprehend a world without war.

The Duke of Windsor is there, together with such other losers as General Howard-Vyse and General Gamelin.14 All look entirely inadequate to the cynicism, efficiency, brutality, and bloody-mindedness that will be required to win the war. As

and it is said that Waugh's witnessing numerous blunders and acts of overt cowardice there soured him permanently on the army, the war, and the pretense of high purpose claimed by both.

Nor could she help him with the guilt burden of the jilting of the girl to whom he had promised himself and whose life might be irretrievably wrecked by his decision. And this, too, Jerry was able to face... for the war had taught him that life is pitiless and that there is forgiveness for many things, but not for weakness.

Despite these warnings, the Great powers' arsenals were brimful; their ranks, swollen. In this light, to suggest they groped or sleepwalked blindly into a battle not of their making is nonsense. To many politicians and commanders, the coming war was seen as necessary; some relished it as noble and desirable. To most, it was regarded as inevitable.

Far from shocking the rulers of Europe, the war that erupted in August 1914 was widely anticipated, rigorously rehearsed, immensely resourced and meticulously planned.

During the Year of the Monkey, the press, which had hitherto generally supported the war or stuck to feel-good stories of heroism and mateship, vigorously changed its tune. The media reacted to growing middle-class disenchantment with the war: they did not initiate or promote anti-war feeling; they reflected and fed off it.