c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best—in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly. …in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness the first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the dying. While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger. But for all that we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards—they were very free with all these expressions. We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
He wants me to tell him about the front; he is curious in a way that I find stupid and distressing; I no longer have any real contact with him. There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
And be very careful at the front, Paul.”Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
I hated him for making me stop hating him
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
It is far better to win a battle through skilled leadership and wise decisions than violence and bloodshed. It may not seem as glorious to the uninitiated, but in the end it results in fewer wounds--of any kind.
— Frank Herbert
Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ("Fish for silence.")
— Erik Pevernagie
No one lives long in a war. I don't want to lose you as well.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
No one lives long in a war.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
Wars about trifles are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?
— Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Our fight was not for ownership of a fertile piece of land. It was about defending the sanctity of ethics and fairness and dignity --- about defending humanity. Those are the values worth fighting for. If we forsake those very values in war, we become the very thing we are fighting against. We become them. Then what do we have left to fight for?
— Shatrujeet Nath, The Conspiracy at Meru
It struck Yuki as almost comic that humans drew lines on the globe, and on both sides of those lines raised up armies. Then they fought and died to take possession of...what? Hills. Yuki knew he had to fight, and had to win, but that didn't make war anything to be proud of.
— Dean Hughes, Four-Four-Two
Every war has its martyrs — the unsung heroes who sometimes don’t even know the rationale behind the war they are fighting. They fight because they are trained to, kill because they are told to and die because they are destined to.
— Anurag Shourie, Half A Shadow
In a sea of human beings, it is difficult, at times even impossible, to see the human as being.
— Aysha Taryam
This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.
— Thomas M Smith
[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
— Sir Laurens van der Post
He won’t stop the war until you give him the peace prize.
— Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes
War correspondents share something with soldiers
—  when they opt for this profession they know the dangers.
I might wish our Windthorn men were less obsessed with war, but I have to admit it keeps them busy.
— Kate Sherwood, Sacrati
There is a relentless war between good and evil which has to be fought whether one likes it or not.
— Radhika Mundra
Of the 403,272 tank soldiers (including a small number of women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die. Even the most optimistic troops knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew—or those at least who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself—would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armored coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply “boiling up.” The tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable. “Have you burned yet?” was a question tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. “I’m sorry,” the young man replies. “I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.
— Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945
She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was impossible as the other.
— Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.And, by the way he's destroyed the economy. He's squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane.
— Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
Such are the brutalities of war
—  they leave a permanent imprint on mind.
Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.
— James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
People ! We stab people !" says the bayonet.But now the needle starts to laugh,and it may still be laughing yet.With ha and hee and ho ho ho."When I pierce linen, one stitch, and the another, lo—I make a shirt, a sleeve, a dress, a hem.But people you can pierce forever, what will you create from them ?"The Bayonet and the Needle
— Eliezer Shtaynbarg, The Jewish Book of Fables: The Selected Works of Eliezer Shtaynbarg
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece ofspecious humbug designed to conceal it's desire for economic control ofthe Southern states.
— Charles Dickens
[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.
— Sir Laurens van der Post
I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”“Oh god, is it wartime already?”“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Historically, the Germans had a habit of associating the names of objects with the sounds they made. After bell makers-turned-cannon-makers learned that by closing off the mouth of the cannon before lighting the fuse, the entire cannon could be made to explode, the device they invented became known as the 'bum' (for boom!). In keeping with this tradition, the first one-thousand-pound bomb was dubbed 'ein laussen bum' (meaning, "a loud boom"). After the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, they called the fission device 'ein grossen laussen bum' (or, "a big loud boom"). The next obvious step was the fusion, or H-bomb, which was pronounced 'ein grossen laussen bum all ist kaput!
— Charles Pellegrino, Dust
I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. Imiss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you adaughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for yourforgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for yourforgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
— Khaled Hosseini
I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.
— Khaled Hosseini
It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything" Tariq nodded knowingly. It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict. Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in mid-air, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild. But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke. At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the moaning of the wounded. Morning brought no relief. The muezzin's call for namaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and the mountains fired on Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city watched as helpless as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.
— Kim Thúy, Ru
I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly
I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
You cannot win a war outside until you have won the war that you are fighting inside you first.
— Akshay Vasu
Shepherds use religion to fight wars, sheep fight over religion.
— Piet Hein Wokke, Revolution
In a war of truth and lie, lie retreats always with shame and pity.
— Ehsan Sehgal
I myself beheld the King Charge at the head of all his Table Round, And all his legions crying Christ and him, And break them; and I saw him, after, stand High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume Red as the rising sun with heathen blood, And seeing me, with a great voice he cried, "They are broken, they are broken!" for the King, However mild he seems at home, nor cares For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts— For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs Saying, his knights are better men than he— Yet in this heathen war the fire of God Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives No greater leader.
— Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King
Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
— Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
I am sorry to disturb you,' said James politely, 'but these people wished to shoot us.
— Evelyn Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia
What magic was this, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion. One could have believed that the last war these people had fought had left only happy memories, had carried in its wake nothing but joy and prosperity. Women and girls were smiling as if their sons and lovers were invulnerable.
— Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
Now, if you don’t know ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’, then ‘Dixie’ will do nicely…” Tom began, cocking the pistol.	Jesse stared, mouth agape at the carnage in the room.	“NOW PLAY!” Tom exploded.
— C.G. Faulkner, Unreconstructed
Seemingly opposing forces can amalgamate.
— Andy Harglesis
When we comprehend how few wars have ever been fought for the sake of justice or the people; how personal spite, the ambition of military professionals, and the protection of capitalistic ventures are the real moving powers...then the mythology of war will no longer bring us to our knees.
— Rauschenbusch Walter 1861-1918
I’d prefer ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’, if you take requests…” Tom had turned and rested his elbows on the bar. His hand was inches from the Colt. These were the men he was looking for.
— C.G. Faulkner, Unreconstructed
According to Kant’s late work on the Principles of Politics (1793), the irreducible problem of the human species is the following: the human being is an animal and thus, to live peacefully with other animals of its kind, absolutely needs a master.
— Gregg Lambert, Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae
I think the best way I can put it,” Tom summarized, “was what I was once told that a Confederate prisoner said to his Union captor. The Yank said: ‘Why do you fight us so hard, Reb?’, and his prisoner replied: ‘Because you are here, Yank’.
— C.G. Faulkner, Unreconstructed
Such subtle covenants shall be made, Till peace itself is war in masquerade.
— John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
We are all changed by this war, Soph. Daniel is your brother now that Rachel is ... gone. Truly your brother. And this baby, he or she is innocent of ... his or her creation.''It's hard to forget,' she said quietly. 'And I'll never forgive.''But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.'Sophie sighed. 'I suppose,' she said, sounding too adult for a girl of he
— Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.
— Simon Winder, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History
The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?”“I should rather die.”“You nearly did.”“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Then I’m tempted to die just to … spite him.”“That’s the spirit that will win us the war.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
There in the sweet sacking smell of the mail bags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home.
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
North Korean troops gathering… inside North Korea.That is unheard of.""They were massing very close to the border.""North Korea is the size of Ohio. It would be geographically challenging for them to gather very far from the border.
— Sylvain Neuvel, Sleeping Giants
On the night of New Year’s Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year’s resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.
— Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War
Sam. Brianna is dead.”He just stared at her. Then, in a soft, almost childlike voice, he said, “Breeze?”“She stopped Gaia. It looked like Brianna almost killed her. The second time she . . . But this time . . .”There were tears in Sam’s eyes. “My God. How is Dekka?”“Like you’d expect. Destroyed. Roger’s dead, too, so Edilio . . . It’s been really bad, Sam. Really bad. It’s like we’re in a war.”“We are.
— Michael  Grant, Light
The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you're facing is a mere mortal, no different from you-- which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help your keep your mental balance.
— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War
The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth's gravity and all it's analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.
— Michael Chabon, Moonglow
I returned to the fields of glory, where the green grass an' flowers grow,An' the wind softly sings the story of the braves lad of long ago.In the great glen, they lie a-sleeping, where the cool waters gently flow,An' the grey mist is sadly weeping for the brave lads of long ago.See the tall grass is there a-waving as their flags were so long ago;With their heads high, were forward braving, marching onwards to meet the foe.March no more, my soldier laddie, there is peace where there once was war.Sleep in peace, my soldier laddie. Sleep in peace now, the battle's o'er.
— Unknown
Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
— Alfred Thayer Mahan
We need to cease allowing the past to define us. We are evolving as a human race, and just because war and aggressive competition has always been a part of our heritage, that doesn’t mean we are forever destined to war and engage in aggressive competition.We are moving forward to a time when the heart will guide us. We once had to fight to survive, and some still do. Yet now it is time to lay down our weapons and open our hearts to the expansive potential of human compassion and creativity.Where our attention goes, energy flows. Do we continue to focus on opposition and give it our energy? Or do we begin to focus our energy on our own authentic freedom to shine and help to illuminate the world? The choice is ours.There are no mistakes – you are exactly where you need to be, and you were born with the precise gifts needed to transform a dying world into a thriving planet.
— Alaric Hutchinson, Living Peace
You help us, they’ll lock you up for the rest of your life.
— Henry V. O'Neil, Live Echoes
I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanising me.They are my opium tto see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and thre present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction.With this clinical, psychopathically detached behaviour considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how hese respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.
— Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War
Swifts,flushed from chimneys, catch fire and swoop like blown sparks out over the ramparts and extinguish themselves in the sea.
— Anthony Duerr
What do you want? What do you want?...To see the world burn, and a new one be born from the ashes…
— S.R. Crawford, No Secrets: Remastered
Oppression is opposition.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Psychology is a soft weapon but you can take outmore enemy battalions with leaflets and radio broadcasts than with high explosives.
— Nelson DeMille, The General's Daughter
Letti wasn’t born to pass through the world. She had been born to sit atop of it.
— S.R. Crawford, Bloodstained Betrayal
When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
— George Orwell, 1984
The pyromaniacs of the Third Reich were now playing their final scene on the stage of the world: they who had set the world aflame were now perishing in their own fires.
— Miklós Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account
I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, great wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
The study of scriptures is a weapon of war.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The world now understands the concept of a 'desk murderer.' We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty.
— Simon Weisenthal
Do not avert your eyes.It is important that you see this.It is important that you feelthis.
— Kamand Kojouri
And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don't already have one.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect
In the matter of war, ask this question to yourself and to your own fellow country men: Have you ever seen any politician in your country without legs, without arms, without eyes after war? No! You can’t see such a thing because honourless politicians always stay in the safe ports while they send others to the zone of death!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
In this world, those who have fallen in love cannot make clear judgements.
— Feng Nong, A Lonesome Fragrance Waiting to be Appreciated
Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.
— Sarah Moss, The Tidal Zone
Isabelle had always simply reacted in her life. Someone left her behind
—  she followed. Someone told her she couldn't do something
They could be gone for years, healed over and laid to rest, and then out of nowhere the gun smoke stung my eyes, the wet jungle invaded my nose, and I had to bury them all over again. You could leave a war, but it never left you.
— Mindy Mejia, Everything You Want Me to Be
If the newspapers begin to publish stories about wars, and the people begin to think and talk of war in their daily conversations, they soon find themselves at war. People get that which their minds dwell upon, and this applies to a group or community or a nation of people, the same as to an individual
— Andrew Carnegie
Death is the solution to all problems. No man-no problem.
— Joseph Stalin
Treason is a matter of the date, Proctor
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies... Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare.
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
It is nearly impossible.''Nearly impossible and impossible are not the same thing.
— Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing.
— Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
They might watch American movies, wear American clothes, even read American books but Bush and the Iraq War have made actual American people social lepers; she only has to open her mouth in some places to feel a wave of loathing directed at her. Katie is weary of pointing out that at least half her countrymen detest their President even more than Europe does, but it’s no good.
— Amanda Craig
they were forbidden words, laced with the fear of transgression and sin.
— Michelle Frost, Wisdoms of the Light
I do not think that in those early days of September, Hitler was fully aware that he had irrevocably unleashed a world war. He had merely meant to move one step further. To be sure, he was ready to accept the risk associated with that step, just as he had been a year before during the Czech crisis; but he had prepared himself only for the risk, not really for the great war.
— Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich
Where an open war is impossible, oppression can continue quietly behind the scenes. Terrorism. Guerrilla warfare, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?The true antipode of peace is violence. And those who want peace in the world should remove not only war from the world but also violence. If there is no open war but there is still violence, that is not peace.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
nations never see themselves clearly in the mirror, much less when war preys on their minds
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
Weapons and technology may help win wars, but it is only ideas that have the power to truly change the world.
— Simon Adams
Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
He doesn't trust people because he knows they are all the same. Everyone cares about their own survival and nothing else, just like him. Since he is more than willing to kill for it, so are they. After all, he has endured through all these years, leading him to be alone, it was the only conclusion that made sense.
— Joe Reyes, Aftermath
They killed him because he was too innocent to live.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Doesn't it seem that it is always by chance that these things happen, or is it because of the generosity of a shared knowledge of suffering that allows for it?
— David Gianadda, Everything You Say Is Goodbye
Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.
— Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude
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
What southern whites further sought, and in a sense demanded, was respect. This the North provided after 1876 in paeans to the courage and dedication of soldiers on both sides. Resentment of northern power, the war’s destruction, and Reconstruction continued to be strong in the South, and the work of white-supremacist politicians, army veterans, and southern women turned that resentment into a long-lasting ideology of the Lost Cause. Northerners, for their part, congratulated themselves on winning the war and freeing the slaves; they also took pleasure in feeling superior to the South for many generations, while industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and other social changes diverted much of their attention from wartime issues [184].
— Paul D. Escott, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States
It was a superstition among them that a lover who smoked would always return, even from France. A man's sexual capacity might be injured by smoking, but they would always prefer a faithful to a potent lover.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
In the United States the continued influence of the old elite meant that southern politics fell under the domination of a Democratic Party that gloried the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the Ku Klux Klan, and resistance to Reconstruction. White supremacy was made into the fundamental cause of the South, and racism became the tool to enforce white unity behind the Democratic Party whenever a political challenge arose. Another tactic used over and over again to maintain the Solid South was to warn against outside threats and outside agitators. The mentality of a defensive, isolated, but gallant South helped Democratic leaders to deflect attention from the problems of their society and the effects of their rule.These powerful social currents, aided by women’s groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shaped and inhibited the region’s culture. Conformity to white supremacy, segregation, and Democratic Party rule was a social imperative for generations of southerners who were indoctrinated in the belief that they had suffered grave injustice with the defeat of their glorious Lost Cause. Had the diverse political leaders of so-called Radical Reconstruction continued to exercise some power or influence, the South would have been a very different society [187].
— Paul D. Escott, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States
The Assault Guards had one submachine-gun between ten men and an automatic pistol each; we at the front had approximately one machine-gun between fifty men, and as for pistols and revolvers, you could only procure them illegally. As a matter of fact, though I had not noticed it till now, it was the same everywhere. The Civil Guards and Carabineros, who were not intended for the front at all, were better armed and far better clad than ourselves. I suspect it is the same in all wars-always the same contrast between the sleek police in the rear and the ragged soldiers in the line.
— George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
It's the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers.
— Diana Gabaldon, The Fiery Cross
When the bombs fell, it wasn't a war; it was an obliteration. No one had any idea who shot first or why.
— Joe Reyes, Aftermath
All you could do was hope for silence, for still air.
— Peter Akinti, Forest Gate: A Novel
I think this galaxy would be a whole lot nicer and more pleasant place to live if we all just stop killing one another. Who's with me on this?"A few chuckles and a couple of faux cheers were the response."You're a visionary," I-Five told him."Float it past Palpatine, see what he thinks," Uli suggested.
— Michael Reaves, Jedi Healer
Innocence always calls mutely or protection when we would be so much wise to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor how, except by taking a look at the little I will be leaving.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Those soldiers belonging to the victorious side whose blood has oozed into the ground and whose hearts have ceased beating, have they partaken in the triumph as well as those who are unscarred and busy draining cups of sake to each other's glorious deeds? I rather think they belong instead to the defeated."..."You mean that those who are killed all belong to the defeated, regardless of which side they were on?
— Erik Christian Haugaard, The Samurai's Tale
I’m not a rebel. I was sent here to protect, not to harm.
— Michelle Frost, Wisdoms of the Light
It will never end.Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.
— Bernard Cornwell, The Flame Bearer
We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.
— Arundhati Roy, Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations
We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing.
— Clifford D. Simak, Way Station
Could it be he was feeling a certain nostalgia for the war, despite its stench and meaningless carnage? For that questionless life of instinct?
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit. Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.
— James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
There isn’t a viler creature on earth than a politician who sends the children of others to the war but not his own children!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.
— James S.A. Corey, Babylon's Ashes
Dawn, slowly filling Church Street with grey light, disclosed another day of war. Because it did this, this dawn bore no more resemblance to a peace-time dawn than the aspect of nature on a Sunday bears a resemblance to the aspect of nature on a weekday. Thus it seemed that dawn itself had been grimly harnessed to the war effort.
— Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude
After us, there was no more world to receive anyone.
— Mia Couto, Sleepwalking Land
The easiest way to forget about the people who are dying in wars right now is to close our eyes and ears! And this is also the ugliest and the vilest way!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Peace ought not be regarded the height of civilization, else like barbarians we forever battle for peace.
— Criss Jami
I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man's soul.
— Christina Henriquez
I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war than threaten to steal a man's soul.
— Christina Henriquez
We could see in our own country as late as the 1960's and 1970's how good Christian and Jewish men, the pillars of our society, when they acceded to political and military power, could sit calmly and cooly in their air-conditioned offices in Washington and cold-bloodedly, without a qualm or a moral quiver, plan and order the massacre of hundred of thousands of men, women and children and the destruction of their homes, farms, churches, schools and hospitals in a faraway Asian land of poor peasants who had never threatened us in the slightest, who were incapable of it. Almost as savage was the acceptance by most of us citizens of such barbarism, until, toward the end, our slumbering - or should one say, cowardly? - consciences were aroused.
— William  L. Shirer
How did the war creep up? How did it gather itself together? What was it made from? What secrets, lies, betrayals? What loves and hatreds? What sums of money, what metals?
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Condemning war has not curbed armed conflict. Religion and education did not eliminate war. Warfare did not terminate more wars. Armed combat simply breeds endless wars.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side’s propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars. Saber-rattlers proclaim that the opposition’s militant disciples instituted this ordeal of conquest and destruction.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls