c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
— Naomi Klein
War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.
— Erasmus
War...is ugly and brutalizing, and the nobility is in doing it without becoming ugly and brutalizing.
— Dana Kramer-Rolls, The Way of the Cat: Nap, Do Nothing, and Stretch Your Way to a Blissful Life
We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
— John  Williams, Stoner
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
— Henry Kissinger
Whenever and wherever men have engaged in the mindless slaughter of animals (including other men), they have often attempted to justify their acts by attributing the most vicious or revolting qualities to those they would destory; and the less reason there is for the slaughter, the greater the campaign for vilification. 
— Farley Mowat
Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.
— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.
— Muhammad Ali
I've been thinking of something your father said - that the true measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it. He was talking about freedom - fighting for liberty. But I believe 'tis the same for love as war.
— Laura Frantz, The Colonel's Lady
Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.
— Jonathan Haidt
Diversity is an aspect of human existence that cannot be eradicated by terrorism or war or self-consuming hatred. It can only be conquered by recognizing and claiming the wealth of values it represents for all.
— Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
— Iain Banks, Use of Weapons
The enemies of your enemies are not always your friends, but they can still be useful.
— James D. Sass, Essays in Satanism
He was safe for the moment, here in the playground, but people all over the world were suffering, starving, fleeing, killing one another as they waged their wars. How much energy they put into harming one another. How little into saving. Would it ever change? What would it take to make it change? He thought of Luxa's hand pressed into Ripred's paw. That's what it would take. People rejecting war. Not one or two, but all of them. Saying it was an unacceptable way to solve their differences. By the look of things, the human race had a lot of evolving to do before that happened. Maybe it was impossible. But maybe it wasn't. Like Vikus said, nothing would happen unless you hoped it could. If you had hope, maybe you could find the way to make things change. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try.
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Code of Claw
On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. 
— Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal.
— Leslie Charteris, The Last Hero
That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate predjudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home
—  what they fear is physical force.
When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.
— Mary Doria Russell, A Thread of Grace
What passing bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,And bugles calling for them from sad shires.What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall,Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,And each, slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
— Wilfred Owen, The War Poems
Then he'd come back home and found out that war didn't cause fear—love did.
— Patricia Briggs, Frost Burned
So does nobody care about Ireland?""Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.
— Edward Rutherfurd, The Rebels of Ireland
They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despite being one myself.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away...
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Her father’s shadow looked sadly down at her. “You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won’t forget your war either.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
Presidents have absolutely gone against the will of Congress. Congress hasn't declared a war since December 7, 1941, and yet we've been at war ever since with somebody or other in order to justify the war machine. Now we have alienated almost the entire earth
— Gore Vidal
The movies, I thought, have got the soundtrack to war all wrong. War isn't rock 'n' roll. It's got nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix or Richard Wagner. War is nursery rhymes and early Madonna tracks. War is the music from your childhood. Because war, when it's not making you kill or be killed, turns you into an infant. For the past eight days, I'd been living like a five-year-old — a nonexistence of daytime naps, mushy food, and lavatory breaks. My adult life was back in Los Angeles with my dirty dishes and credit card bills.
— Chris Ayres, War Reporting for Cowards
In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls… generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls.
— Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
— Bertolt Brecht
The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.
— Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game. 
— Amy Goodman
You're really going to do it, aren't you? You're really going to go back to war?" Gregor said. He could feel something boiling up inside of him. "So, we'll just forget about what happened. The jungle, the Firelands, the Bane." His voice was rising and he could feel the rager side of him taking over. "Forget about everybody who's dead! Tick and Twitchtip and Hamnet and Thalia and Ares! And your parents, Luxa! And your pups, Ripred! Let's just forget about everybody who gave their lives so that you could have this moment where you could — could make things right again! So you could stop the killing! We were fighting for the same thing, remember? You two owe each other your lives! You owe me your lives! And now you stand there and ask me to choose between you? To help you kill each other?" Gregor yanked Sandwich's sword from his belt and swung it so violently that even Luxa and Ripred stepped back. "Well, guess what? The warrior's not fighting for either of you!
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Code of Claw
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
— Thomas Hobbes
In love there are two evils: war and peace.
— Horace
Even in war there should be lines you didn't cross.
— Suzanne Collins, Gregor and the Code of Claw
Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there'd be no more wars.
— Robert Anton Wilson
War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
— Sebastian Junger, War
Feeling of hatred unto your enemy, drains your energy as enemy wanted.
— Toba Beta
It's an irony of our times that men seeking peace must make war.
— Mark  Lawrence, Emperor of Thorns
The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
How much energy they put into harming each other. How little into saving.
— Suzanne Collins
Surely no one would ever use such a weapon against a city.""There are no limits in war," Volger said, still staring out the window.
— Scott Westerfeld, Goliath
To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
The music at a wedding procession always reminds me of the music of soldiers going into battle.
— Heinrich Heine
A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3
— Erich Maria Remarque
War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
He remembered his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.
— Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
War and marriage and childbirth had passed over her without touching any deep chord within her and she was unchanged.
— Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
It is love and reason,' I said,'fleeing from all the madness of war.
— H.G. Wells, A Dream of Armageddon
I was a coward. I went to the war.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.
— Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany
No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.
— Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death? Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of sale drawn up plainly in advance what we're getting killed for... so we can be sure after we've won your war that we've got the same kind of freedom we bargained for.
— Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.
— Alan W. Watts, The Way of Zen
Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
They say this war is a cloud over the land! But they make the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, ‘Shit, it’s raining!
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar.""Titanic City" was born.It's the song, they said.No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.It's the sex, they whispered.Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo."Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.
— Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Despite all my public misconduct, in the past year, I had learned the Elemental spells, the Doppelschläferin, and the preparation and flying of a magic broom; I had survived two months as prisoner of war, saving the life of captain Johanne in the process; I had escaped the dungeons of Fortress Drachensbett, and after an arduous journey successfully reunited with my double, so preserving her, and all Montagne, from Prince Flonian's rapacity, I would somehow master the despicable art of being a princess.
— Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben
We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.
— Pat Barker, The Ghost Road
Are you a communist?""No I am an anti-fascist""For a long time?""Since I have understood fascism.
— Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
The only animal capable of giving man a fair fight is man. Actually, among ourselves, we fight unfairest of all, and the more we practice, the nastier we get.
— Robert Buettner, Overkill
No soldier ever really survives a war.
— Audie Murphy
I love that name. A country named Chad. Sounds like somebody who lived next door to the Brady Bunch. But if Chad actually lived next door to the Bradys, Greg would be roasting over a slow fire and Marcia would be standing naked on an auction block, because Chad is one of the hungriest, craziest, most desperate places on the planet.
— Gary Brecher, The War Nerd
Truces may stop the battles, but part of you will always feel like you're at war.
— David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing
We just sat there and watched the plane pass the island, and it never came back," he said. "I could see it on the radar. It makes you feel terrible. Life was cheap in war.
— Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.
— David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
— Thomas Carlyle
So fair a victor, how can I help but be conquered.
— Alice Borchardt, The Wolf King
Women shouldn't be in combat," said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. "Neither should men, in my opinion.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour
Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If we can use an H-bomb--and as you said it's no checker game; it's real, it's war and nobody is fooling around--isn't it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed . . . and even losing the war . . . when you've got a real weapon you can use to win? What's the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?'Zim didn't answer at once, which wasn't like him at all. Then he said softly, 'Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.'Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, 'Speak up!'I'm not itching to resign, sir. I'm going to sweat out my term.'I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn't really qualified to answer . . . and one that you shouldn't ask me. You're supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?'What? Sure--yes, sir.'Then you've heard the answer. But I'll give you my own--unofficial--views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cuts its head off?'Why . . . no, sir!'Of course not. You'd paddle it. There can be circumstances when it's just as foolish to hit an enemy with an H-Bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him . . . but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing . . . but controlled and purposeful violence. But it's not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It's never a soldier's business to decide when or where or how--or why--he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people--"older and wiser heads," as they say--supply the control. Which is as it should be. That's the best answer I can give you. If it doesn't satisfy you, I'll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can't convince you--then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.
— Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
I'm a fucking coward.""Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb.
— Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.
— Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
The things men did or felt they had to do.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
They ex­pect­ed to lose. And there­fore, they lost. [..] Peo­ple who start think­ing deep dark thoughts in the mid­dle of a war start ex­pect­ing to lose.
— Michael Scott
I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.
— Willie Nelson, The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart [With Headphones]
What is war?' I asked.Oh, it's a messy, stupid business,' he said, 'Two sides wave flags and beat drums and shoot one another dead. It always begins this way, making speeches, talking about rights, and all that sort of thing.'But what is it for? What do they get out of it?'I don't know,' he said. 'To tell you the truth, I don't think they know themselves.
— Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle and the Green Canary
Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses theinitiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defendmakes them timorous.
— Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great
The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages.	...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam.	What the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad.
— Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology
Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.
— Jillian Lauren
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.
— Clint Eastwood
Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?
— William T. Vollmann
Unfortunately, that still leaves plenty of Americans who don't read much or think much -- who will still be extremely useful in unjust wars. We are sick about that. We did the best we could. 
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
You're not like other Wasps.""Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score.""A few," Salma allowed."Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken.
— Adrian Tchaikovsky, Empire in Black and Gold
He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story
— Ted Dekker, BoneMan's Daughters
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Acknowledgements! My thanks to HollywoodWhen you showed me John RamboStitching up his arm with no anaestheticAnd giving them “a war they won’t believe”I knew then my calling, the job for meThanks also to the recruitment advertsFor showing me soldiers whizzing around on skisAnd for sending sergeants to our schoolTo tell us of the laughs, the great food, the payThe camaraderieI am, dear taxpayer, forever in your debtYou paid for my all-inclusive pilgrimageOne year basking in the Garden of Eden(I haven’t quite left yet)Thanks to Mum and thanks to DadFuck it,Thanks to every parentFlushing with pride for their brave young ladsBuying young siblings toy guns and toy tanksWaiting at the airportWaving their flags
— Danny Martin
The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.
— Noam Chomsky
I cannot have chaos erupting around me until I am prepared for it. I am a collector. I am an observer. I don't participate. My resources, and my standing, must be secure before I can allow the uncertainty of war to crash down upon us.
— Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant
War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.
— Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
It's always good to be underestimated.
— Melissa de la Cruz, Lost in Time
I can assure you that no kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the kingdom of Christ.
— Montesquieu, Persian Letters
If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst. [One may know the condition of a whole army from the behavior of a single man.]
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
— Rebecca West, The Book Of Military Quotations
Fortune favours the brave, sir," said Carrot cheerfully."Good. Good. Pleased to hear it, captain. What is her position vis a vis heavily armed, well prepared and excessively manned armies?""Oh, no–one's ever heard of Fortune favouring them, sir.""According to General Tacticus, it's because they favour themselves," said Vimes. He opened the battered book. Bits of paper and string indicated his many bookmarks. "In fact, men, the general has this to say about ensuring against defeat when outnumbered, out–weaponed and outpositioned. It is..." he turned the page, "'Don't Have a Battle.'""Sounds like a clever man," said Jenkins. He pointed to the yellow horizon."See all that stuff in the air?" he said. "What do you think that is?""Mist?" said Vimes."Hah, yes. Klatchian mist! It's a sandstorm! The sand blows about all the time. Vicious stuff. If you want to sharpen your sword, just hold it up in the air.""Oh.""And it's just as well because otherwise you'd see Mount Gebra. And below it is what they call the Fist of Gebra. It's a town but there's a bloody great fort, walls thirty feet thick. 's like a big city all by itself. 's got room inside for thousands of armed men, war elephants, battle camels, everything. And if you saw that, you'd want me to turn round right now. Whats your famous general got to say about it, eh?""I think I saw something..." said Vimes. He flicked to another page. "Ah, yes, he says, 'After the first battle of Sto Lat, I formulated a policy which has stood me in good stead in other battles. It is this: if the enemy has an impregnable stronghold, see he stays there.'""That's a lot of help," said Jenkins.Vimes slipped the book into a pocket."So, Constable Visit, there's a god on our side, is there?""Certainly, sir.""But probably also a god on their side as well?""Very likely, sir. There's a god on every side.""Let's hope they balance out, then.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
War, my friends, is a thing of beauty.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.
— Diana Gabaldon
I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.
— Margaret Mead
In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!
— Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
Are we entirely ready, sir?" said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means "We are not entirely ready, sir.""We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.
— Terry Pratchett, Jingo
I've learned that from a war ignited by revenge, nothing can be born, but sorrow. - Aladdin
— Shinobu Ohtaka
How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.
— Karl Kraus
War is just demographics in a hurry.
— Gary Brecher, The War Nerd
Right," said Fat Charlie conversationally. "You realize, of course, that this means war." It was the traditional war cry of a rabbit when pushed too far.
— Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
... 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.
Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.
— Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
Even the king's Erkynguard might have wished to be elsewhere, rather than here on this killing ground where duty brought them and loyalty prisoned them. Only the mercenaries were here by choice. To Simon, the minds of men who would come to this of their own will were suddenly as incomprehensible as the thoughts of spiders or lizards—less so, even, for the small creatures of the earth almost always fled from danger. These were madmen, Simon realized, and that was the direst problem of the world: that madmen should be strong and unafraid, so that they could force their will on the weak and peace-loving. If God allowed such madness to be, Simon could not help thinking, then He was an old god who had lost His grip.
— Tad Williams, To Green Angel Tower
A cop's JOB is to violently enforce upon the rest of us whatever arbitrary bullshit the political parasites declare to be "law." It is, therefore, impossible to be a "law enforcer" and behave morally, for the same reason one can't be a moral car-jacker.
— Larken Rose
For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.
— David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays
I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;--then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting. (in "The Sporting Spirit", Tribune, GB, London, December 1945)
— George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1903-1950
War, in some ways, is merciful to men. It makes them heroes if they are the victors. If they are the vanquished - they do not live to see their homes taken, their wives widowed. But if you are a woman - you must live through defeat...
— Samhita Arni, Sita's Ramayana
There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war
—  there is only just and unjust war.
John Smith: Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds.
— Paul Cornell
Major Major never sees anyone in his office while he's in his office.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
— Sebastian Junger, War
The war which is comingIs not the first one. There wereOther wars before it.When the last one came to an endThere were conquerors and conquered.Among the conquered the common peopleStarved. Among the conquerorsThe common people starved too.
— Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956
There are certain verses in the Quran which convey injunctions similar to the following: 'Kill them wherever you find them.' (2:191) Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is total untrue. Such verses relate in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. (pp. 42-43)
— Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, The True Jihad: The Concept of Peace, Tolerance and Non Violence in Islam
This is stupid.""Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You think in war it must be different. Must be better. With death around the corner, men united against hardship, the cunning of the enemy, people must think harder, faster, be...better. Be heroic.Only it's just the same. In fact do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it's worse. There aren't many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they'll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work. There's no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stock yards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.
— William C. Westmoreland
The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.
— Sebastian Junger, War
ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred with out a head
— Euripides
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
— Albert Camus
You cannot choose your battlefield,God does that for you;But you can plant a standardWhere a standard never
— Nathalia Crane, The Singing Crow And Other Poems
When you are dealing with an invisible enemy,use most resources as shield, and a bit as a bait.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
— Sebastian Junger, War
One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.
— Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln
We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6
— Erich Maria Remarque
Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Tracer lighting up the sky.It's another families' turn to die.A child afraid to even cry out says,He has been here.And I see no bravery,No bravery in your eyes anymore.Only sadness.
— James Blunt
Rostov kept thinking about that brilliant feat of his, which, to his surprise, had gained him the St. George Cross and even given him the reputation of a brave man - and there was something in it that he was unable to understand. "So they're even more afraid than we are!" he thought. "So that's all there is to so-called heroism? And did I really do it for the fatherland? And what harm had he done, with his dimple and his light blue eyes? But how frightened he was! He thought I'd kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand faltered. And they gave me the St. George Cross. I understand nothing, nothing!
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
...all the horrors of war are soon forgotten in the pomp and circumstance of show and parade.
— James Henry Gooding
-You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You're dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
— W.E.B. Du Bois