c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
One of the great myths about war is that there is a ground zero, a center stage, where the terrible forces unleashed by it can be witnessed, recounted, and replayed like the launching of a rocket. War is a human activity far too large to be contained in the experience of a single reporter in a single place and time in any meaningful way. When it comes, it happens to everyone. Everything is in its path. Yet this is the allure of war reporting, the chance of acquiring some personal mother lode of truth to beam back to the living rooms of a waiting nation. The fear that comes from reporting on a war is as much a fear of missing this mother load as it is of being injured or killed in battle, and it sets reporters apart from the people who have to fight wars. Soldiers have their own agonies to think about as a battle approaches. Missing the war is not generally one of them.
— John Hockenberry, Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence
His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilization of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not just an idle metaphor: the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six, the same risk facing a player of Russian roulette.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?
— Christopher Hitchens
He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.
— Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.
— R. Scott Bakker, The White Luck Warrior
In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.
— James Franck
War created bizarre allies, while peace itself could be divisive.
— Ian Rankin, Blood Hunt
I'm done doing this!' Obama said, finally erupting. 'We've all agreed on a plan. And we're all going to stick to that plan. I haven't agreed to anything beyond that.'The 30,000 was a 'hard cap,' he said forcefully. 'I don't want enablers to be used as wiggle room. The easy thing for me to do - politically - would actually be to say no' to the 30,000. Then he gestured out the Oval Office windows, across the Potomac, in the direction of the Pentagon. Referring to Gates and the uniformed military, he said. 'They think it's the opposite. I'd be perfectly happy -' He stopped mid-sentence. 'Nothing would make Rahm happier than if I said no to the 30,000.'There was some subdued laughter.'Rahm would tell me it'd be much easier to do what I want to do by saying no,' the president said. He could then focus on the domestic agenda that he wanted to be the heart of his presidency. The military did not understand. 'Politically, what these guys don't get is it'd be a lot easier for me to go out and give a speech saying, 'You know what? The American people are sick of this war, and we're going to get out of there.
— Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars
It dosnt matter how many mr. and mrs. johnsons are anti war- the actuall killers who know how to use the weapons are not.
— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
Obama had campaigned against Bush's ideas and approaches. But, Donilon, for one, thought that Obama had perhaps underestimated the extent to which he had inherited George W. Bush's presidency - the apparatus, personnel and mind-set of war making.
— Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars
You see all the other fellows were so active and earnest and all that sort of thing- always rampaging, and skirmishing, and scouring the desert sands, and pacing the margin of the sea, and chasing knights all over the place, and devouring damsels, and going on generally- whereas I liked to get my meals regular and then to prop my back against a bit of rock and snooze a bit, and wake up and think of things going on and how they kept going on just the same, you know!
— Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon
It's almost hard to imagine anything more undemocratic than the view that political officials should not debate American wars in public, but only express concerns 'privately with the administration.' That's just a small sliver of Johnson's radicalism: replacing Feingold in the Senate with Ron Johnson would be a civil liberties travesty analogous to the economic travesty from, say, replacing Bernie Sanders with Lloyd Blankfein.
— Glenn Greenwald
Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
During an hour-long conversation mid-flight, he laid out his theory of the war. First, Jones said, the United States could not lose the war or be seen as losing the war.'If we're not successful here,' Jones said, 'you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.' A setback or loss for the United States would be 'a tremendous boost for jihadist extremists, fundamentalists all over the world' and provide 'a global infusion of morale and energy, and these people don't need much.'Jones went on, using the kind of rhetoric that Obama had shied away from, 'It's certainly a clash of civilizations. It's a clash of religions. It's a clash of almost concepts of how to live.' The conflict is that deep, he said. 'So I think if you don't succeed in Afghanistan, you will be fighting in more places.'Second, if we don't succeed here, organizations like NATO, by association the European Union, and the United Nations might be relegated to the dustbin of history.'Third, 'I say, be careful you don't over-Americanize the war. I know that we're going to do a large part of it,' but it was essential to get active, increased participation by the other 41 nations, get their buy-in and make them feel they have ownership in the outcome.Fourth, he said that there had been way too much emphasis on the military, almost an overmilitarization of the war. The key to leaving a somewhat stable Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame was improving governance and the rule of law, in order to reduce corruption. There also needed to be economic development and more participation by the Afghan security forces.It sounded like a good case, but I wondered if everyone on the American side had the same understanding of our goals. What was meant by victory? For that matter, what constituted not losing? And when might that happen? Could there be a deadline?
— Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars
Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don't want it back.
— Robert A. Taft
Almost everything about Afghanistan was troubling Mullen. As Obama was giving intense focus on the war, Mullen was feeling more personal responsibility. Afghanistan had been marked by 'incredible neglect,' he told some of his officers. 'It's almost like you're on a hunger strike and you're on the 50th day, and all of a sudden you're going to try to feed this person. Well, they're not going to eat very quickly. I mean, every organ in the body is collapsing. The under-resourcing of Afghanistan was much deeper and wider than even I thought. It wasn't just about troops. It was intellectually, it was strategically, it was physically, culturally.
— Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars
One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.
— Stéphane Audeguy, The Theory of Clouds
McChrystal had organized a jaw-dropping counterterrorism campaign inside Iraq, but the tactical successes did not translate into a strategic victory. This was why counterinsurgency - blanketing the population in safety and winning them over - was necessary.
— Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars
There is something almost insane about countries without common borders going to war, something unnatural.
— Stéphane Audeguy, The Theory of Clouds
If no war in heaven, then defeat ain't misery.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
War's a racket. No doubt. But war is a racket for the politicians, not the soldiers.
— Sean Beaudoin, You Killed Wesley Payne
Everyday we are at war. Peaceful mind is earned.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.
— Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity
The coming years will prove increasingly cynical and cruel. People will definitely not slip into oblivion while hugging each other. The final stages in the life of humanity will be marked by the monstrous war of all against all: the amount of suffering will be maximal.
— Pentti Linkola, Can Life Prevail?
I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.
— Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family
In wars amongst ideas, doubters are the victims.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years, she read, and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly. "There has never been a war." In her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief. So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, Four Ways to Forgiveness
We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.
— Bernard Kouchner
George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.
— Gideon Haigh
Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;While the earth dreamed, and only I was wareOf that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.Nor any mournful music in her streams:Only I saw the shadow on her brows,Only I knew her for the yearly slain,And wept, and weep until she come again.
— Frederic Manning
As he grew older, which was mostly in my absence, my firstborn son, Alexander, became ever more humorous and courageous. There came a time, as the confrontation with the enemies of our civilization became more acute, when he sent off various applications to enlist in the armed forces. I didn't want to be involved in this decision either way, especially since I was being regularly taunted for not having 'sent' any of my children to fight in the wars of resistance that I supported. (As if I could 'send' anybody, let alone a grown-up and tough and smart young man: what moral imbeciles the 'anti-war' people have become.)
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
The struggle for power had reached a new stage; it was fought with scientific formulas. The weapons vanished in the abyss like fleeting images, like pictures one throws into the fire....When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades on Red Square in Moscow or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph....Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubalcain marched past in the parade of phantoms.
— Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees
But not all Gaza residents were committed to the war. A reporter asked one of the Arabs what he most wanted. He was a taxi driver, father of ten. All he wanted was 'to eat and to work.' What did he think of Nasser? 'Nasser is good, Israel is good, America is good, Britain is good, Canada is good, India is good, Anything is good.
— Robert John Donovan, Six Days In June: Israel's Fight For Survival
Superficially my war was a comfortable exercise in futility carried out in a grand Scottish hotel amongst the bridge players and swillers of easy-come-by whisky. My chest got me out of active service and into guilt, as I wrote two, or is it three of the novels for which I am now acclaimed.
— Patrick White, Three Uneasy Pieces
Bless God, he went as soldiers,His musket on his breast—Grant God, he charge the bravestOf all the martial blest!Please God, might I behold himIn epauletted white—I should not fear the foe then—I should not fear the fight!
— Emily Dickinson
Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry...Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
She consoled herself with the thought that the pictures were graphic enough to shake people up, stop them being complacent about what was happening, and if that meant the war would end sooner, those two deaths weren't in vain. As she hoped, with less and less confidence each day, that Michael's had not been in vain. Too much waste to bear.
— Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters
Any negotiation has a limit. Otherwise, war is irrelevant.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
The Hubbermanns had two of their own (children), but they were older and had moved out...Soon they would be both in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be shooting them.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
At time of peace, we should love one another.At war, we should set our minds as the hunters.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
War in heaven makes no peace on earth.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
The 'will to peace' is the best answer that we can imagine to the 'will to war', which unfortunately seems as strong in this century as it was in the middle of the last.
— David   Petersen, Survivors: The A-bombed Trees of Hiroshima
In the Second World War he took no public part, having escaped to a neutral country just before its outbreak. In private conversation he was wont to say that homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it. Fortunately this outlook, which is reminiscent of Bentham, has become rare in this age, which recognizes that heroism has a value independent of its utility. The Last Survivor of a Dead Epoch
— Bertrand Russell
And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
The best thing we could have done for Afghanistan was to get out of our Humvees and drink more green chai. We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends.
— Craig M. Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education
Christ! What are patterns for?
— Amy Lowell, Selected Poems
An agile, well-trained, brave elephant, ridden by a good mahout, its trunk armed with the kind of sabre known as a qartal and covered with chain mail, while the rest of its body is protected by sheets of bark and iron, surrounded by 500 men to defend it and protect it to the rear, can fight against 6000 men on horseback.
— Al-Mas'udi
That's what any committed patriot would do: Fight to the last. Defeat your enemy at any cost
—  then hope you have enough left to rebuild.
During the few months Troy had been back home, he’d told his friends about us, and so we quickly eased into the conversation as though we’d all known each other for many years. They embarrassed us with great thanks for having served overseas. They recounted combat events Troy had told them, and we realized by the context of their stories that Troy had made us heroes for his friends because we’d been heroes to him. At this point I was the saddest I’d yet been over Troy’s passing, because the true friend from war is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others.
— Anthony Swofford, Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles
Arms control is by definition a rejection of disarmament.
— David T. Dellinger
Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most...A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing of his power is in those places where his army is not...Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself and hold them firm without a single swordsman?
— Brian Ruckley, Bloodheir
This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo’s sincerely godless generation, the question hasn’t come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There’s no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there’s nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war — these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.
— Ian McEwan
War would end if the dead could return.
— Stanley Baldwin
the worst thing we can do, the absolute worst, is to do nothing.
— Fritz Gerlich
Yea ! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved ;Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ; Courage that sunsOnly foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns.
— Gilbert Frankau
That's right,' Mel said. 'Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.'Same things we fight over these days,' Terri said.Laura said, 'Nothing's changed.
— Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you.
— Agnes Newton Keith, Three Came Home
So why don't they face us... examine our evidence, debate, talk... act like real historians instead of thought-police? Why shut us out of the media, pass laws against our speaking, persecute us, sue us, and vilify us?
— Randolph D. Calverhall, Serpent's Walk
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. 
— David T. Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays
I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting (WWI) to those who want the war to go on forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.
— Paul Nash
Wars are won in the will.
— Robert Fanney
The War,' said a soldier proverb, 'will last a hundred years--five years of fighting and ninety-give of winding up the barbed wire.
— Preston William Slosson
By now the crusaders had christened the most powerful French catapult 'Mal Voisine', or 'Bad Neighbour', while nicknaming the Muslim stone-thrower that targeted it for conter-bombardment 'Mal Cousine', or 'Bad Relation'.
— Thomas Asbridge
It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.
— Jessie Douglas Kerruish, The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension
the militay dont start wars, politicians start wars
— William C. Westmoreland
Some people think that nothing moves in this world without leave of the woman. Do not know more, but I can say that war never happened, nor can there be, when you do not want to leave sovereign
— José de Alencar
Though all the guns be silenced,each soldier in his home,There is no peace till Love comes,till the meek may safely roam.
— C.P. Klapper, The Washington Poems
For no one makes aggresive war unless he excepts to win
— Robert A. Taft
History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit.
— Thomas B. Costain
It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of the situation. If a nuclear bomb were detonated, we'd all just be collateral damage. That's why it has to be prevented, because trust me when I say that nobody will be standing up for our rights or life when there's no one left to do so.
— Rebecca McNutt
Boys fight the wars. We’d have the brotherhood of man tomorrow if the politicians had to get out and fight.
— Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance
This war has made racists of too many of the and too many of us, and it is the leadership in Khartoum that has stoked this fire, that has brought to the surface, and in some cases created from whole cloth, new hatreds that have bred unprecedented acts of brutality.
— Dave Eggers
Monsters cut children open and call it progress. Monsters murder entire groups of people without blinking but get upset when they have to wash human ash from their garden strawberries. Monsters are the ones who watch other people do these things and do nothing to stop it.
— Ryan Graudin, Blood for Blood
The psychological components of war have not gone away—dominance, vengeance, callousness, tribalism, groupthink, self-deception
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
After the Guam conference ended, it was reported that Pope Gregory ceased to pray for peace in the world. Two special Masses were sung in the basilica: the Exsurge quare obdormis, Mass against the Heathen, and the Reminiscere, Mass in Time of War; then, the report says His Holiness retired to the mountains to meditate and pray for justice.
— Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
The holy war is only within.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Yael wanted to be like the Valkyrie maidens in the old Norse lore. Winged women who rode to war on the backs of wolves, choosing which soldiers lived and died. She'd thought she could death mean something, if she wielded it right
— Ryan Graudin, Blood for Blood
That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.
— Izzeldin Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity
A funeral procession, the women scream until they fall down in a faint, the men hold them up, the boys cry silently sand swear to take up arms in their father's name. It is the same funeral procession that their fathers saw, their fathers before them, and their grandfathers unto generations unknown, where the same vow was taken.
— Claire North, The End of the Day
The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down his face, not when the force of Elf's attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.
— Daniel Polansky, The Builders
They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelations. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.
— Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
The Military don't die. They go to heaven to join god's army and prepare for armageddon.
— Zander Stephens
Then as Anna listened another sound began to rise within the first. It began as a low keening, like the wind in a bottle tree, almost indiscernible amid the guns. Yet it was there, and it grew and grew, gaining strength and timbre until suddenly a new note broke away and was taken up: a high weird quavering like nothing that Anna had ever heard, that peopled the smoke with an army of mourning phantoms. Anna had heard the men talk of this, too—the uncanny demon cry of the Rebel army going into the attack—and now here it was for real, echoing across violence and death for the last time in a wild crescendo that seemed to peak and yet peak again: descanting blood, crying lost youth and the loss of all dreams. One last time it shrilled out of the rolling smoke, then collapsed all at once into a maelstrom of voices—the deep snarling utterance of thousands of men in hell.
— Howard Bahr, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War
It's too bad war makes peopledisappear like chess pieces, and that prisonsturn prisoners into movie endings.
— Major Jackson
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed To wander through my brain four decades later As I have wandered in a dream through yours?The violence of waking life disruptsThe order of our death. Strange dreams occur, For dreams are licensed as they never were.
— Louis Simpson
If not for a dumb beast's incomprehension at its own destruction beneaththe loving hands of two heartbroken children.
— Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates
We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this.
— Alwyn Hamilton, Hero at the Fall
I decided to start a war, father", I said, cheerfully, "it's so much more interesting than peace.
— Bernard Cornwell
The wheels of history are lubricated with human blood.
— Fuad Alakbarov
A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Adversity has the remarkable ability of introducing the real you to yourself.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
The most insidious of our country, the greediest and highest rung of our socioeconomic ladder, line their pockets with misappropriated funds as military personnel and hordes of civilians are maimed or killed. It’s not their children out there, blinded by manufactured patriotism or lured into the service with the promise of economic stability, all with the sanctimonious blessings of misguided public consent by way of corporate, state-sponsored media. It won’t be their children who are terrorized by Wahabbist insurgents tearing through city blocks and rural areas as only an ever-devouring plague could. It won’t be any of their loved ones watching thousands of years of civilization unraveling like an old sweater as each thread of wool is lit on fire or stolen to sell on the black market for greedy consumers with a fetish for hijacked Mesopotamian artifacts.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
There are people who come home from war and want to talk about the pain, but no one wants to listen; there are others who want to keep silent and repress the memories, and all their family and friends want is to talk about it. I call this the war veteran reintegration paradox.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Bad ages to live through are good ages to learn from.
— Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years
In movies, war only looks romantic. “Tell my gal I love her…” close-up shot, and fade out. It doesn’t work as beautifully and neat in real life. Flying chunks of human flesh and screaming orphans really put that Hollywood take into perspective and there is nothing clean or sterile about any of it. When people die, it’s fucking horrible.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
I'm silent when there is a war inside me. There's a need to keep the people outside intact.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Everyone around me was allowed, permitted to fall apart; yet I had to think twice. I couldn't bear to take another dip into an ocean of solitude for another taste of ostracization. I felt I would die.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
In love, in war, truth is rubber that can be pulled and stretched into an infinite number of shapes.
— Peggy Herring, This Innocent Corner
Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
— Sebastian Junger, War
Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making
—  they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it.
When you’re persistently deleted from history, media, and any other channel to access information – or that information is distorted – it’s far worse than physically killing someone. It, instead, induces a form of psychological death. How can you truly be alive, how can you genuinely breathe, when everyone around you believes that you either don’t exist or are dead?
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
A country that publicly threatens to completely destroy another nation should not be surprised when a preemptive surprise attack occurs from that nation and their allies.
— Steven Magee
The most dangerous thing to the USA population is not North Korea, it is the USA government.
— Steven Magee
Someone needs to put a muzzle on President Trump sooner rather than later.
— Steven Magee
I regard President Trump as an international terrorist.
— Steven Magee
The holy war is within.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The ease with which moneyforgives bayonets and liesto justify the massacre with reasoned arguments
— Xiaobo Liu, June Fourth Elegies
The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
It was a frightening metaphor for what the United States was becoming – a Titanic of rich, proud dimwits heading for the iceberg of anti-colonialist backlash.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Aside from clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, I have not met one person in war who thoroughly enjoyed killing. If someone ended up bragging over a kill, it was safe to assume that their story was mere fabrication or that they were one bad day away from an inpatient psychiatric ward. No matter how much someone may appear to deserve to be killed, something dies within us when we kill. It's contradictory, the antithesis of our species survival instinct.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Veterans being sent into unjust wars for corporate profit is a perversion of trust, at best. I found the emotional manipulation of both sides, the propaganda at play so incredibly revolting that I couldn't stand to idly wave a flag or flaunt yellow ribbons without asking serious questions regarding motive.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Nothing is easier than to get peaceful people to renounce violence, even when they provide no concrete ways to prevent violence from others.
— Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
A woman in combat? Yes. Since when? Since Native American warrior Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked that prick General George Custer off of his horse. Since Pantea Arteshbod propelled herself to become one of the greatest Persian commanders during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Since Hua Mulan disguised herself as a male to engage in combat and became one of China’s most respected heroines.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.
— Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
Hungry men are not known for their patience or their kindness.
— Karen Essex, Pharaoh
There exists a line within every man, a line that frightens even us. When an enemy comes to our very doorstep to endanger wife and child, our Beast is unleashed. The Lionmage had gone feral.
— Braith Maxwell, Makennan Novantumus, Book II: Demigod's Vendetta by Nobility Bound
You must bear losses like a soldier, the voice told me, bravely and without complaint, and just when the day seems lost, grab your shield for another stand, another thrust forward. That is the juncture that separates heroes from the merely strong.
— Margaret George, The Memoirs of Cleopatra
In the battle for possession of souls and worlds, it is likely that all serve to only one master.
— Robert Neil Fleischer, Alien Biography
Every country has its own problem too numerous to name, so does North Korea. And it’s no one’s business to solve the latter’s problem unless it seeks for it. If North Korea shows off its nuclear weapon capability, it’s because its sovereignty was threatened by foreign powers. It doesn’t want to happen to its country what’s happening now in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Justice and charity begin at home, not at someone’s backyard. Hence, any country trying to solve North Korea’s problem by force or by any means should start first in its own backyard and solve the political and social injustices, divisions, and neglect suffered by its own citizens.
— Danny Castillones Sillada
Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: "In reality, who am I?" The defensive attitudes created by this violent bringing together of the colonised man and the colonial system form themselves into a structures which then reveals the colonised personality. This 'sensitivity' is easily understood if we simply study and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime. It must in any case be remembered that a colonised people is not only simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation, the Germans remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
On armageddon day,' Sandy said, 'both armies will think they fight for good. And both of them will be wrong.
— George R.R. Martin, The Armageddon Rag
Armageddon,' Sandy said. 'The final battle. The ultimate confrontation between good and evil. That's what armageddon is supposed to be. Right?'Hobbins lifted a pale white eyebrow, said nothing.'Which side are we?' Sandy demanded. 'Which side are we?''That's one you got to work out yourself, friend. This ain't like in Tolkien, is it?
— George R.R. Martin
So much of war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth even starting a train of thought.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
You've got to cram it into your thick heads: the sickos that sent us to this place are so stuffed with hate they've got to spew it out on someone, it almost doesn't matter who. If it's not one race, face or religion it'd be another. Right now it's us they vomit on. Next war it'll be some other poor beggars, then some others, then -''I want to go home!' the poor woman gasped, in between shakes and sobs.'And I want to murder every last beast in this hellhole with my bare hands,' Girder raged. She had hands as big as dinner plates. 'The best we can do instead is live. Are you listening? The only way to beat them is by not dying. So shut up and survive, you miserable cow. And let the rest of us sleep.
— Lucy Adlington, The Red Ribbon
War is not an art, boy. Send a hundred men over a hill and know that they won’t make it. Hold a drummer boy, cut open from groin to neck, guts spilling out as he cries for his mother, telling him it’s going to be all right. Make him believe you. Be his commanding officer, his god. Let him let his guard down and be kind enough to snap his neck. War is butchery. And I am the better butcher.
— Alex Avrio, The Alchemist's Box
Humans want peace, not war. But, sometimes war is needed to establish peace!
— Md. Ziaul Haque
Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.
— Barbara Tuchman
[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.
— Barbara Tuchman
The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
— Sebastian Junger, War
She looks to be about three, the same age as his daughter at home in California...the girl's eyes are open. She seems to be cowering...Graves reaches in to pick her up- thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her...when the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out.
— Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
I cruised into this war thinking my buddy's going to take a bullet, and I'm going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm's way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding in the backseat of her dad's car.
— Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy. His wife and children may be shoeless
—  someone will always buy him drink or weapons.
To stay alive, you have to keep moving. Running, relocating, driving, doing everything in your power to stay in motion and make it to safety.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
A moving target is harder to kill, and I didn't stop running, maneuvering, until I reached home base, where I could breathe between death-defying sprints. I just need to make it home alive, and this will all be over, I told myself. Home.
— M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior
Today, we have mercenaries in Africa, corporate armies from the western world, and unemployed men throughout the Middle East killing their own people - and people of other nations - for a paycheck. To act without a conscience, but for a paycheck, makes anyone a dangerous animal. The devil would be powerless if he couldn't entice people to do his work. So as long as money continues to seduce the hungry, the hopeless, the broken, the greedy, and the needy, there will always be war between brothers.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Some days I feel like I will die for them. Some days, with them.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.
— Ernst Toller
The war dragged on, as wars tend to do.
— Kelsey Brickl, Hardtack: A Civil War Story
Pick a side? You done picked the wrong side.
— Kelsey Brickl, Hardtack: A Civil War Story
My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.
— Edna O'Brien, The Little Red Chairs
The Marine Corps forced me to come home from Afghanistan. It's up to me to allow myself to come home.
— Thomas J Brennan
Can it be that there is not enough space for man in this beautiful world, under those immeasurable, starry heavens? Is it possible that man's heart can harbour, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire to destroy his fellows? All the evil in man, one would think, should disappear on contact with Nature, the most spontaneous expression of beauty and goodness.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Raid
They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American