Best 17621 quotes in «war quotes» category

Ironically, the vice president, like President Trump and the hawkish national security adviser John Bolton, has never served in the military. Yet Pence held forth like a four-star (armchair) general about the need for young American troops to do battle in a “dangerous world”.

Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin

I run through the woods, at once applauding myself for my wit-" "Well deserved, sir. Well deserved." "And at the self instant, I am grinding my teeth because I am a vain, revenging idiot and shall be run down because of it.

I said, 'I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.' Ah!' said [Captain], 'I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade, and sham-fight. Yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed, or crippled for life, it has a very different look.' Do you know what they fought about?' said I. No,' he said, 'that is more than a horse can understand, but the enemy must have been awfully wicked people, if it was right to go all that way over the sea on purpose to kill them.

I saw Oberon charge into the fray on a huge black warhorse, glamour swirling around him, and sweep a hand toward the thickest of the fighting. Vines and roots erupted from the ground, coiling around the Iron fey, strangling them or pulling them beneath the earth. Atop a rise, Mab raised her arms, and a savage whirlwind swept across the field, freezing fey solid or impaling them with ice shards. The armies of Summer and Winter howled with renewed vigor and threw themselves at the enemy.

I saw that this cataclysm must be an expiation for some barbarous crime of civilization, some terrible human lie. What the lie was, I had too little knowledge of history or science to know then. I know now it was our believing that we were fulfilling some end, serving some plan - that all would come out well in the end, because there was some great plan over all. Instead of the reality. There is no plan. All is hazard. And the only thing that will preserve us is ourselves.

I see why Demokracy is illegal. First comes yelling. Frustration. Indecision. Disagreements. Ideas.

I say we have no time for debate. Indeed, we have no need for it, since the decision has been made for us. We must fight. There is no other path!

I sense that you are nearby, son and daughter of the Almari bloodline. I will soon come for you both.

I signaled the bus-driver and he stopped the bus for me right outside the cottage, and I flew down the steps of the bus straight into the arms of the waiting mother.

ISIS BEHEADS CIVILIANS WHILE WORLD KEEPS FORGETTING WHAT VICTIMS' SOULS R BEGGING: HUMANITY SAVE KOBANE

Is it not funny, in the presence of an unlimited God, we will still be stucked? Sometimes faith overwrites the fact, that some people have not come to realise. Stop giving excuses and telling God what is happening around you. You have the tools.

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his quarrel before that invisible Court of Arbitration with which all religion is concerned. Unless he thinks he is vitally, eternally, cosmically in the right, he is wrong to fire off a pocket-pistol.

Islamic killers are over here because we are over there.

I slowly dug a stand-up foxhole up to my neck using my helmet. I don’t think any of us slept that night. It was the first time in my tour when I wasn’t sure I would make it. I’m not ashamed to say I did a lot of thinking about home and a lot of praying to the man upstairs.

I smelled war on the horizon, with more deaths and trouble to come" Bombing of the Twin Towers From Rape of a Nation by Sara Niles

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’ ‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denying that.’ Captain Chillingworth’s words emerged very slowly, as if they had been pulled up from a deep well of bitterness. ‘I am sure it will do a great deal of good for some of us. But I doubt I’ll be of that number, or that many Chinamen will. The truth is, sir, that men do what their power permits them to do. We are no different from the Pharaohs or the Mongols: the difference is only that when we kill people we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.

Isn't it amazing that, historically, the "Prince of Peace" has most often been introduced to new cultures through extreme violence? European and American colonialists bring this disparity to light in a way that makes me wish that forced conversion didn't work so extraordinarily well.

Isn't that how most conflicts start? With a gross miscalculation of the possibilities of escalation? A village first, then a peninsula, and then a continent? It is cold up here, commander. Cold and distant. Just a point in space from their viewpoint - valuable but aesthetically detached.

I sometimes think that normal, everyday life is only a delusion. We walk on a think crust of earth which we call peace; and every now and again we can hear a rumble below our feet; and sometimes the crust splits and we see that, underneath there is a glowing inferno ready to erupt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it is always there.

Isn't it funny how true peace describes war and chaos?

I spent much of that year trying to imagine a future distorted by war.

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming a man to realize how lucky I’d been. It took a few hard knocks in life to make me realize the only thing my dad had ever wanted or worked for was to give me a chance at being better than him.

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me … I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home…

I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.

[...] I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America.

Is there anything in your life trying to slip off? Is your health threatening to leave you? Is your joy threatening to go? Is your job in jeopardy? Is your marriage shaking? Is there anything that you have been looking for in life? Is there anything near you that is about leaving you? Is there anything that you ever lost that was so dear to you? Jesus asked me to tell you that whatever that is gone out of your hand will come back again. Whatever that has gone out of your hand that you need to stay back with you will come back again.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?" Pierre wondered. "Good for me, but bad for the next traveler, and anyway he can't help it - he has to eat. He told me an officer thrashed him for that. But the officer thrashed him because he was in a hurry. And I shot Dolokhov because I considered myself insulted. Louis XVI was executed because he was considered a criminal, and within a year the men who executed him were killed as well for doing something or other. What's bad and what's good? What should we love and what should we hate? What is life for, and what am I? What is life? What is death? What kind of force is it that directs everything?" He kept asking himself. And there were no answers to any of these questions, except one illogical response that didn't answer any of them. And that response was: "You're going to die, and it will be over and done with. You're going to die and you'll either come to know everything or stop asking." But dying was horrible too. The Torzhok pedlar woman was whining away, offering her wares, especially some goatskin slippers. "I've got hundreds of roubles, money I don't know what to do with, and she stands there in her tatty coat hardly daring to look at me," Thought Pierre. "And what does she want money for? As if it could give her a hair's breadth of extra happiness or put her soul at rest. Is there anything in the world that can make her and me any less subject to evil and death? Death, the end of everything, and it must come today or tomorrow - either way it's a split second on the scale of eternity." And again he twisted the screw that wouldn't bite, and the screw went on turning in the same hole.

Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal (Dostoevski once mentions in his diaries that in Siberia, among scores of murderers, rapists, and burglars, he never met a single man who would admit that he had done wrong) who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it? (...) During the war, the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of “the battle destiny for the German people” [der Schicksalskampf des deutschen Volkes], coined either by Hitler or by Goebbels, which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.

I suffered my own battles. I suffer still.

I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.

I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.” “Oh god, is it wartime already?” “Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.

Is your wife the devil? That is the reason the bible says we should cast out devil. Is your husband the devil? The bible still repeat cast out the devil. How can you reach your world if you can't reach your home? How do you expect to win the whole world if you can't win in your house.

It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipment To be counted and signed for. On occasion some of us break down, And those parts which can't be salvaged Are replaced with other GI parts, that's all.

It can be easy to forget the lessons of history, including the tragedies of war, and ramp up divisive and destructive rhetoric without concern for the consequences.

It doesn't matter who started it or what it's really about...war usually ends up sucking most for women. Even when we're not fighting the battles ourselves, we somehow always end up with the lion's share of the suffering.

I tell people I was in the U.S. Army for three and a half years in WWII -- but what did I mainly do to beat the fascists? Play the banjo.

It goes right across the hood...a great big fuck-off rocket before our very noses.

It had been his opinion that it might serve his country if the Chinese and his men saw that he was not afraid to die. For the comprehension of our age and the part treason has played in it, it is necessary to realize there are many English people who would have felt acutely embarrassed if they had to read aloud the story of this young man's death, or to listen to it, or comment on it in public. They would have admitted that he had shown extreme capacity for courage and self-sacrifice, and that these are admirable qualities, likely to help humanity in the struggle for survival; but at the same time he would not please them. They would have felt more at ease with many of the traitors in this book. They would have conceded that on general principles it is better not to lie, not to cheat, not to betray; but they also would feel that Water's heroism has something dowdy about it while treason has a certain style a sort of elegance, or as the vulgar would say, 'sophistication'. William Joyce would not have fallen within the scope of their preference, but the cause for that would be unconnected with his defense of the Nazi cause. The people who harbor such emotions find no difficulty in accepting French writers who collaborated with the Germans during the war. It would be Joyce's readiness to seal his fate with his life which they would have found crude and unappetizing. But Alan Nunn May, and Fuchs, Burgess, and Maclean would seem in better taste. And concerning taste there is no argument. Those who cultivate this preference, would not have been prepared to defend these men's actions if they were set down in black and white. They would have admitted that it is not right for a man to accept employment from the state on certain conditions and break that understanding, when he could have easily obtained alternative employment in which he would not have to give any such undertaking; and that it is even worse for an alien to induce a country to accept him as a citizen when he is homeless and then conspire against its safety by handing over the most lethal secret it possesses to a potential enemy of aggressive character. But, all the same, they would have felt that subtlety was on the side of the traitors, and even morality. To them the classic hero, like poor young Terence Waters, was hamming it. People who practice the virtues are judged as if they had struck the sort of false attitude which betrays an incapacity for art; while the people who practice the vices are judged as if they had shown the subtle rightness of gesture which is the sign of the born artist.

I tell you that what has changed is the whole conception of human life- that men of every race on this earth may have the same opportunity to live beautifully- to live in purity without fear or hunger or hatred- as brothers, not as brutes tearing through these hideous swamps of ignorance and war. Men speak of a belief in God. I am beginning to understand what every Christ- and their skins have been every color- what every Christ has taught: That love of God is love of mankind. That no one can profess to love God while he hates the least of his fellows. Jesus, if He were on earth right now, would fight to free men from oppression and evil and war; and you who have made a pious mockery of his every commandment- you would kill Him.

I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac." "I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked." "So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff." "There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith." "I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit." "But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?

It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.

I think the best way I can put it,” Tom summarized, “was what I was once told that a Confederate prisoner said to his Union captor. The Yank said: ‘Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?’, and his prisoner replied: ‘Because you are here, Yank’.

I think it would be more correct to say that mass movements are powerful, and therefore have the potential to do great damage or good. The United States mobilized in a way that could be called a mass movement to fight the Second World War–and so did the Japanese. Were those mass movements good or bad? Both nations felt justified in what they did, and the rights and wrongs depend on which side you are on.

I think that certain emotions can compromise you when you’re at war. If you stop to mourn the dead, or even to breathe in what you’ve done, you’ll be dead as well. Your brain goes to a primitive region, one inaccessible to feelings beyond pure anger and pure fear. Your brain is reduced to two impulses: fight or flight. Kill or be killed. No room for more delicate feelings. No room for a soul. All you’re thinking about is how to maneuver your body in space so it will survive.

I think this galaxy would be a whole lot nicer and more pleasant place to live if we all just stop killing one another. Who's with me on this?" A few chuckles and a couple of faux cheers were the response. "You're a visionary," I-Five told him. "Float it past Palpatine, see what he thinks," Uli suggested.

I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.

I think, though, that another shame of war is that when it’s over, a soldier don’t get to leave it behind where he fought it. He’s gotta carry it right back home with him, in his head, and in his heart.

I think to myself: I don't want to survive this one I want to burn up in the wreckage