c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies.
— Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
So you love war. I used to think you were a decent man. But I see now I was mistaken. You're a hero.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
— Noam Chomsky
War is the greatest evil Satan has invented to corrupt our hearts and souls. We should honor our soldiers, but we should never honor war.
— Dean Hughes, Far From Home
This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.
— Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
I do not say that there is no glory to be gained [in war]; but it is not personal glory. In itself, no cause was ever more glorious than that of men who struggle, not to conquer territory, not to gather spoil, not to gratify ambition, but for freedom, for religion, for hearth and home, and to revenge the countless atrocities inflicted upon them by their oppressors.
— G.A. Henty
Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.
— Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.
— Scott Westerfeld, Goliath
Bumblestripe: “I think we showed them.”Hazeltail: “Showed them what? How much blood can be spilled in a pointless battle?
— Erin Hunter, Night Whispers
...according to the teachings of Islam, war is to be waged not against the enemy but against the aggressor. (p. 49)
— Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, The True Jihad: The Concept of Peace, Tolerance and Non Violence in Islam
Keep a cool surface. Calm. Detached. As inside a part of you has been shattered.
— Amy Ephron, A Cup of Tea
When we take your person into account, you who are a young maiden, to whom God gives the strength and power to be the champion who casts the rebels down and feeds France with the sweet, nourishing milk of peace, here indeed is something quite extraordinary! For if God performed such a great number of miracles through Joshua who conquered many a place and cast down many an enemy, he, Joshua, was a strong and powerful man. But, after all, a woman – a simple shepherdess – braver than any man ever was in Rome! As far as God is concerned, this was easily accomplished. But as for us, we never heard tell of such an extraordinary marvel, for the prowess of all the great men of the past cannot be compared to this woman's whose concern it is to cast out our enemies. This is God's doing: it is He who guides her and who has given her a heart greater than that of any man.
— Christine de Pizan, Ditié de Jehanne d'Arc
I will give you a few guarantees of my own, Mukthar. I guarantee that before the sun sets, even if you win, even if my cold, dead body is lying on the field, you will rue the day you ever set foot in the Plains. For every inch you advance I'll exact gallons of Mukthar blood. I guarantee that there will be not one family of the Bear Mukthars or they will mourn at least one of theirs. I guarantee that even if you are triumphant the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you fail to kill me today, you will meet me again. You will meet me at the Ximerionian border. You will meet me at every city, town, village, and hamlet. You will meet me on every Amirathan crossroad, on every hill. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every arrow, with every dagger. I will fight you with pitchforks. I will fight you with the very rocks of the land you try to conquer. I will never, never, never gi
— Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Chains - Part 3: Bonds of Blood
We cannot control the way people interpret our ideas or thoughts, but we can control the words and tones we choose to convey them. Peace is built on understanding, and wars are built on misunderstandings. Never underestimate the power of a single word, and never recklessly throw around words. One wrong word, or misinterpreted word, can change the meaning of an entire sentence - and even start a war. And one right word, or one kind word, can grant you the heavens and open doors.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
It’s too bad war gets all the attention
—  it’s too bad the plant is easier to see than the root.
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
Liberty medals...Are they trying to bribe me with coloured ribbons? I wouldn't kill a man for one of those things. Or go and be killed. Any shooting I do is to save my own life, and not for a ribbon and a hunk of bronze. [says Mäkelä]
— Väinö Linna, The Unknown Soldier
As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this. 
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse
If women ruled the world there would be no wars. But, we all would have been aborted.
— Christy Leigh Stewart
How good music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Bella Swan: Jasper? Are you sure there's nothing I can do to help? Jasper Hale: Well just your presence alone, your scent, will distract the newborns. Their hunting instinct will take over, and drive 'em crazy. Bella Swan: Good, I'm glad. [Jasper nods and begins to walk away] Bella Swan: . Bella Swan: Hey, [Jasper turns around] Bella Swan: how do you know so much about this? Jasper Hale: I didn't have quite the same upbringing as my adopted siblings. [Rolls up sleeves and shows Bella his arms, which have bite marks on them] Jasper Hale: . Bella Swan: [Hops off Jeep] Those bites are like mine. Jasper Hale: Battle scars [smiles] Jasper Hale: . All the training the Confederate Army gave me was useless against the newborns, but still, I never lost a fight. Bella Swan: Hey, this - this happened during the Civil War? Jasper Hale: I was the youngest major in the Texas Calvary, all without having seen any real battle. Bella Swan: Until...? Jasper Hale: Till I met a certain immortal... Maria
— David Slade
If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.
— George Orwell, 1984
Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
— George Orwell, 1984
Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
ARMOR, n. The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal.
— Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.
— Ernest Hemingway
Did you see the frightened ones,Did you hear the falling bombs,Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter in the promise of a brave new world unfurlled beaneath the clear blue skies.Good bye blue skies.
— Roger Waters
Battle for the sake of honor may be a fine thing for bards to sing of, but it is no way to preserve one's homeland
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
— Herodotus
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
— Hermann Göring
This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Destruction is a man's will,Nevertheless Prevention is also a man's will,Its a man's choice to choose between Destruction and Prevention. :)
— Babu Rajan
It is the duty of youths to war against indiscipline and corruption because they are the leaders of tomorrow.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I did not know that the style and nobility of the jousting arena had nothing to do with this thrust and stab. Just like killing a screaming piglet for bacon after chasing it round the sty. And I did not know that war thrilled men so: they come home laughing like schoolboys after a prank; but they have blood on their hands and a smear of something on their cloaks and the smell of smoke in their hair and a terrible ugly excitement on their faces.I understand now why they break into convents, force women against their will, defy sanctuary to finish the killing chase. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know war was like this. I feel I have been a fool not to know, since I was raised in a kingdom at war and am the daughter of a man captured in battle, the widow of a night, the wife of a merciless solider. But I know now.
— Philippa Gregory
For Ares, lord of strife,	Who doth the swaying scales of battle hold,	 War’s money-changer, giving dust for gold,	 Sends back, to hearts that held them dear,	Scant ash of warriors, wept with many a tear,	Light to the hand, but heavy to the soul;	  Yea, fills the light urn full	 With what survived the flame—	Death’s dusty measure of a hero’s frame!
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
The slaying of multitudes should be mourned with sorrow. A victory should be celebrated with the funeral rite.
— Lao Tzu
I shall remain vigilant and unyielding in my pursuit of the enemies of the Coalition.I will defend and maintain the Order of Life as it was proclaim by the Allfathers of the Coalition in the Octus Canon.I will forsake the life I had before so I may perform my duty as long as I am needed.Steadfast, I shall hold my place in the machine and acknowledge my place in the Coalition.I am a Gear. 
— Karen Traviss, Aspho Fields
not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive.
— Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
Now we're in the middle of a three-sided vampire war. Which would be an awesome video game, but I'm really not interested in playing for real. I like my reset buttons.
— Rachel Caine
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.
— William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Whatever enables us to go to war, secures our peace
— Thomas Jefferson
Panic bells, it's red alertThere's something hereFrom somewhere elseThe war machine springs to lifeOpens up one eager eyeFocusing it on the skyWhere 99 red balloons go by
— Nena
It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power -- the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns -- should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals...
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.
— Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Only a battle lost is sadder than a battle won.
— Robert Jordan, The Fires of Heaven
At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
— Voltaire
War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good. -from her blog
— Catherynne M. Valente
This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every land, who will render faithful service in this war, but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded. This is a War of the Unknown Warriors
— Winston S. Churchill
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.
— Douglas MacArthur
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
— Sebastian Junger
You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes."Do they ever make more sense?"No.
— Mitch Albom, Have a Little Faith: a True Story
If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage wars and kill other people's babies.
— Sonya Renee Taylor
I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground.
— Brenna Yovanoff
The sun's champagne streamed from one body into another. And there was a couple on the green silk of the grass, covered by a raspberry umbrella. Only their feet and a little bit of lace could be seen. In the magnificent universe beneath the raspberry umbrella, with closed eyes, they drank in the sparkling madness.'Extra! Extra! Zeppelins over the North Sea at 3 o'clock.'But under the umbrella, in the raspberry universe, they were immortal. What did it matter that in another far-away universe people would be killing each other?
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders And, The Fisher Of Men
While There may be power in forgiveness, there is even more power in lobbing a Molotov cocktail through someone's dining room window.
— Jim Norton, I Hate Your Guts
Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection.
— Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn  all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
— Julia Ward Howe
Man invents war. Man discovers peace. He invents war from without. He discovers peace from within. War man throws. Peace man sows. The smile of war is the flood of human blood. The smile of peace is the love, below, above.
— Sri Chinmoy
Wouldn't want to miss a war, would I?
— Alison McGhee, All Rivers Flow To The Sea
Maybe he hadn't thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn't accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn't imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.
— Dave Eggers, The Wild Things
...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
— Sebastian Junger, War
You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.
— Helen Thomas
Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home.
— Roma Tearne, Mosquito
The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood
— Otto von Bismarck
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality ...though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]
— Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm
Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
— Winston S. Churchill
What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
— David M. Friedman
Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.
— Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War
Shall I tell you why young men love war? . . . In peace, there are a hundred questions with a thousand answers! In war, there is only one question with one right answer. . . . Going to war makes you a man. It is emotionally exciting and morally restful.
— Mary Doria Russell, A Thread of Grace
War grows out of ordinary human nature.
— Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
The most part of all princes have more delight in warlike manners and feats of chivalry than in the good feats of peace.
— Thomas More
I have been brought up in a world dominated by honor. I have known neither crime, poverty, nor betrayal, and here I taste hatred for the first time: it is sublime, like a thirst for justice and revenge."-the girl who played go
— Shan Sa, The Girl Who Played Go
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
— John F. Kerry
War is the health of the state.
— Randolph Bourne
If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet. Prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive you, war, with arms outstretched.
— Lê Thi Diem Thúy
This is where people misunderstand war. When you attack another country for its resources, you are the pirate. But when you protect your country from the pirates, you are the hero.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
The internet has become a carefully controlled and heavily monitored illusion. It has turned into both a circus and battleground. Popularity is rigged and can be bought. Censorship is in full effect. Popular opinion is fabricated, and the perception of a viewpoint's popularity is typically orchestrated and manipulated by legions of paid trolls. If you want to know the truth about somebody's true popularity and influence, look to the streets. If you want to know if a person is really guilty or innocent, study the facts yourself. Never judge anybody based on what you see or read on the internet. Information can easily be manipulated by the push of a few buttons.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.
— Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking
Think what it implies when you say that a country needs leaders. In your day-to-day life, you interact with all sorts of other individuals. And that's all society is: the collective name for lots of INDIVIDUALS. But for some inexplicable reason, we're taught to believe that one huge, arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of one human livestock farm--I mean, "country") need some control freaks acting as intermediaries in order to interact with a different arbitrarily chosen assortment of individuals (the "citizens" of some other human livestock farm--I mean, "country"). Because gee, how could I and some random person in the middle of China possibly leave each other alone if we didn't each have a gang of narcissistic sociopaths claiming to "represent" us? Oh, wait a minute. That's exactly how and why pretty much ALL wars happen: because different gangs of power-happy psychos pit their pawns against each other in violent conflict, while claiming to "represent" subsets of humanity. One more example of how "government" is a problem posing as its own solution.
— Larken Rose
It is not the dead rather the ones who lives through war have seen the dreadful end of the war, you might have been victorious, unwounded but deep within you, you carry the mark of the war, you carry the memories of war, the time you have spend with your comrades, the times when you had to dug in to foxholes to avoid shelling, the times when you hate to see your comrade down on the ground, feeling of despair, atrocities of the war, missing families, home. They live through hell and often the most wounded, they live with the guilt, despair, of being in the war, they may be happy but deep down they are a different person. Not everyone is a hero. You live with the moments, time when you were unsuccessful, when your actions would have helped your comrades, when your actions get your comrades killed, you live with regret, joyous in the victory can never help you forget the time you have spent. You are victorious for the people you have lost, the decisions you have made, the courage you have shown but being victorious in the war has a price to pay, irrevocable. You can't take a memory back from a person, even if you lose your memory your imagination haunts you as deep down your sub conscious mind you know who you are, who you were. Close you eyes and you can very well see your past, you cant change your past, time you have spent, you live through all and hence you are a hero not for the glorious war for the times you have faced. Decoration with medals is not going to give your life back. the more you know, more experiences doesn't make it easy rather make its worse. Arms and ammunition kills you once and free you from the misery but the experiences of war kills you everyday, makes you cherish the times everyday through the life. You may forgot that you cant walk anymore, you may forget you cant use your right hand, you may forgot the scars on your face but you can never forgot war. Life without war is never easy and only the ones how survived through it can understand. Soldiers are taught to fight but the actual combat starts after war which you are not even trained for. You rely on your weapon, leaders, comrades, god, luck in the war but here you rely on your self to beat the horrors,they have seen hell, heaven, they have felt the mixed emotions of hope, despair, courage, victory, defeat, scared.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.
— Will Advise, Nothing is here...
It is not what you can do for your country, but what you can do for all of mankind.
— Mike  Norton
Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
There are four things you need to know about war. One, every action requires careful tactics. Two, never lose hope and fight only for what is right. Three, be brave but you don't have to be fearless. And four, be willing to sacrifice.
— Courtney Allison Moulton, Wings of the Wicked
If any honor existed in war, it was in fighting to protect others from harm
— Christopher Paolini, Eldest
I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race—I am ashamed to belong to such a species.
— Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell
High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing.
— Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else.
— T.H. White, The Once and Future King
War is young men dying and old men talking
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
To live is - to war with trolls In the holds of the heart and mind
— Henrik Ibsen
Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
— Kakuzō Okakura, The Book of Tea
Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.
— Philip Larkin
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
First Afghanistan, now Iraq. So who's next? Syria? North Korea? Iran? Where will it all end?' If these illegal interventions are permitted to continue, the implication seems to be, pretty soon, horror of horrors, no murderously repressive regimes might remain.
— Daniel Kofman, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
The words we choose to use when we communicate with each other, carry vibrations. The word ‘war’ carries a whole different vibration than the word ‘peace’. The words we use are showing how we think and how we feel. The careful selection of words, helps to elevate our consciousness and resonate in higher frequencies.
— Grigoris Deoudis
Brambleclaw dipped his head. “The battle is won,” he growled. “The clearing is ours. Do you concede or shall we fight for it again?”Blackstar flashed a look of burning hatred over his shoulder. “Take it,” he hissed. “It was never worth the blood that has been spilled here today.
— Erin Hunter, Night Whispers
My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.
— Sarah  Miller, The Lost Crown
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
— Wilfred Owen, The War Poems
Then he leaned over, right there in the restaurant parking lot, and kissed me. And it wasn’t a friendship kiss, either. It was tender and real, and utterly romantic.
— Janette Rallison, All's Fair in Love, War and High School
Kakimi chertyami oni viigrali holodnuyu voinu?"This translates roughly to: "How the hell did these people win the Cold War?
— Dave Barry, Big Trouble
Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.
— Glenn Greenwald, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence - that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fires have been declared and peace treaties have been signed. No one starts a war that way, but they should. It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war - if there is such a thing - will kill anyone old enough to die.
— Alexandra Fulller
They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness.
— Kathy Hepinstall, Blue Asylum
The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically.
— Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.
— Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history.
— Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?
Islamic killers are over here because we are over there.
— Patrick J. Buchanan
Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not whol
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.
— M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating
Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes. O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.
— Wilfred Owen, The Poems Of Wilfred Owen
Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.
— Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens
That’s the attractive thing about war,” said Rosewater. “Absolutely everybody gets a little something.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
Camouflage doesn't help when the other guy is willing to defoliate the whole jungle.
— Andrew Vachss, False Allegations
Her maternal instinct told her Natasha had too much of something, and because of this she would not be happy
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
All war will end when women cease to find men in uniforms attractive - discuss.
— Bill Drummond, $20,000
He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
i have never advocated war except as a mean of peace
— Ulysses S. Grant
In the emergency of growing up, we all need heroes. But the father I grew up with was no hero to me, not then. He was too wounded in the head, too endlessly and terribly sad. Too funny, too explosive, too confusing. Heroes are uncomplicated. *This* makes them do *that*… But the war does not make sense. War senselessly wounds everyone right down the line. A body bag fits more than just its intended corpse. Take the 58,000 American soldiers lost in Vietnam and multiply by four, five, six—and only then does one begin to realize the damage this war has done… War when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable. It is not an occasion for heroism. It is an occasion only for survival and death. To regard war in any other way only guarantees its inevitable reappearance.
— Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
Tis all a Checkerboard of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and stays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.
— Edward FitzGerald
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep.War is kind.Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die.The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -A field where a thousand corpses lie.Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
— Stephen Crane
The Cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom. The cost of wearing the uniform can be high, but... [very long pause] sometimes it's too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question "Why?" Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore. 
— Ronald M. Moore
Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
— Leo Tolstoy
The way of war was the invention of heavenly beings.
— Toba Beta
Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.
— Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Januz feels glad to have her in his arms--his wife, who would do anything to protect their son. This is how she presents herself. Like a soldier who would kill for her country. And her country is their son.
— Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried