Best 769 quotes in «soldier quotes» category

The lady laughed a little laugh and said, “A man with a strong body as yours is not capable of doing anything more than showing a few shiny pieces of cloth? Where is the obsession of the moth that hurtles itself into the flame out of devotion?” “Show me first the wick that burns itself to light the room, Ma’m?

The life of a soldier seemed like a climb up a stairway without any stairs, only the wooden supporting spine of preagreed ritual. Step away from that spine and anything might happen -- to you, by you.

The life that you are about to embrace is not that of a soldier or a commando. It is the way of the assassin.

The man was potent to her system, her very own drug.

The marine corps teaches you how to be miserable. This is invaluable for an artist. Marines love to be miserable. Marines derive a perverse satisfaction in having colder chow, crappier equipment, and higher casualty rates than any outfit of dogfaces, swabjockies, or flyboys, all of whom they despise. Why? Because those candyasses don't know how to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has to be miserable. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not, he will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation. The artist must be like that marine: he has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable. He has to take pride in being more miserable than any soldier, or swabbie, or desk jockey, because this is war, baby, and war is hell.

The men and women who continue to hold Lynn's mind hostage against her will believe the future will be tilled with terrorism, death, destruction and a challenge to the survival of America. They believe Lynn and the other lab rats must still respond to their programming for they are the second line of defence against enemies from within and without and the first line of offence in a catastrophe which would require the recreation of America's constitutional government. They are still intent on preparing Lynn for the day when she will he necessary for battle. One summer day, all these dark realisations came flooding upon Lynn and she knew if she was ever to free herself, she needed to get immediate help.

The people inside the gym didn’t stand a dead drunk’s chance.

The only care a soldier must have in war is to let the fleeting advantage of the enemy take the confidence of his inner field.

The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

‘There’s no time for right or wrong,’ I said.

There’s no better way for a woman to punish a man than to make him sleep away from her.

There are 2 kinds of fighters: those who fight because they hate, and those who fight because they love.

There is no morality to be found in evil. But to recognise that which is truly evil one must forget the rules of morality.

There’s nothing worse than delivering bad news to women. I hoped I wouldn’t get good at it.

The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.

The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck.

The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now

The true test of a soldier’s mettle is whether or not they will cling to what they believe in, even in the face of impending death.

The true soldier knows nothing but war, and the true soldier, for lack of an enemy, attacks himself.

They say God gives the hardest battles to his strongest soldiers

The unrelenting grip of Soldier’s Syndrome slips finger by slow finger. The marrow’s been affected—emotional leukemia at the deepest level. Transplants of love and friendship aid healing, yet time is still key, and the clock never ticks fast enough. Eternity gains perspective when seconds feel like years. How long have I been gone? Six eternities and counting.

The word everyone forgets is 'serve'...Yes. Serve. This is the service, and we soldiers are servants. Sure, when people think of a soldier, they think of soldiers taking. They think of us taking territory, taking the enemy, taking the city or a country, taking treasure, or blood. This grand, abstract idea of 'taking,' as if we were pirates, swaggering and brandishing our weapons, bullying and intimidating people. But a solider, a true soldier, I think, does not take. A soldier gives.

The world he had left was not ready for his return, or rather, he was not ready to return to the world he had left.

The weapon of the advocate is the sword of the soldier, not the dagger of the assassin.

Think carefully before you issue me a command, Zenobia. For I will do what you tell me, even if I'm the worst possible man for the job.

This place is Hell’s waiting room.

War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?

To a man, professional soldiers despised terrorists, and each would dream about getting them in an even-up-battle; the idea of the Field of Honor had never died for the real professionals. It was the place where the ultimate decision was made on the basis of courage and skill, on the basis of manhood itself, and it was this concept that marked the professional soldier as a romantic, a person who truly believed in the rules.

Truly, Macro thought, the most effective weapons in Rome’s arsenal were the picks and shovels wielded by her soldiers.

Uniform of a soldier and uniform of a student both are equally needed for the nation.

Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, - "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart were hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot, O'er the grave where our hero we buried.

Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in.

We are living in an artificial world—a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand—only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult.

We are trained fighting machines. Peace is not an option for us. We’re jarheads. What the hell do we know about peace?

We could scan each car for terrorists and lovers she could lean into my camouflage her head resting on woven trees. When they come for her body she could run deep into my uniform into the forest of me where they could never find her.

We do not guess outcomes or consider if consequences are right wrong or ethical. We execute our orders…not question them. We are soldiers and we are at war against all terrorists…foreign and domestic. ~Seasoned Loyal Solider – United States Armed Forces~

We are born. We die. Somewhere in between we live. And how we live is up to us. That’s it.

We do not guess outcomes or consider if consequences are right wrong or ethical. We execute our orders…not question them. We are soldiers and we are at war against all terrorists…foreign and domestic. ~Seasoned Loyal Soldier – United States Armed Forces~

We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man.

A bus came. The soldier turned away from her and walked toward it. Tatiana watched him. Even his walk was from another world; the step was too sure, the stride too long, yet somehow it all seemed right, looked right, felt right. It was like stumbling on a book you thought you had lost. Ah, yes, there it is.

What I learned in this tragedy was the eternal lesson of good people going bad.

When in doubt - make'em laugh.

-“Why do men like you do the job you do? It can’t be for the medals. And it’s certainly not the money.” Stone said nothing. -“Why then? God and country?” -“Both simpler and more complex, Mr. President.” -“What then?” -“So I can look at myself in the mirror.

Worry only about what you control. The rest is war.

Your name?" George asked him directly. He had probably seen the man a dozen times before yet did not know anything about him. King Davit would have no doubt have known half the man's history already. "Henry." George took Henry's hand firmly in his own and looked into his eyes. This had to be done delicately, to make sure this Henry did not think him a fool. He tried to think of how his father would do it. "Thank you, Henry, for your concern. It is a comfort to know I am so well guarded. I will make sure to praise you when next I speak to the lord general. But for now I think there is no need to worry.

You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.

Abnegation produces deeply serious people. People who automatically see things like need,” he says. “I’ve noticed that when people switch to Dauntless, it creates some of the same types. Erudite who switch to Dauntless tend to turn cruel and brutal. Candor who switch to Dauntless tend to become boisterous, fight-picking adrenaline junkies. And Abnegation who switch to Dauntless become . . . I don’t know, soldiers, I guess. Revolutionaries.

A cause breaks or exalts a soldier's strength; unless that cause is just, shame will make him throw his weapons away.

What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.