c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
From the bonny bells of heather,They brewed a drink long syne,Was sweeter far than honey,Was stronger far than wine.They brewed it and they drank it,And lay in blessed swound,For days and days together,In their dwellings underground.There rose a King in Scotland,A fell man to his foes,He smote the Picts in battle,He hunted them like roes.Over miles of the red mountainHe hunted as they fled,And strewed the dwarfish bodiesOf the dying and the dead.Summer came in the country,Red was the heather bell,But the manner of the brewing,Was none alive to tell.In graves that were like children’sOn many a mountain’s head,The Brewsters of the HeatherLay numbered with the dead.The king in the red moorlandRode on a summer’s day;And the bees hummed and the curlewsCried beside the way.The King rode and was angry,Black was his brow and pale,To rule in a land of heather,And lack the Heather Ale.It fortuned that his vassals,Riding free upon the heath,Came on a stone that was fallenAnd vermin hid beneath.Roughly plucked from their hiding,Never a word they spoke:A son and his aged father –Last of the dwarfish folk.The king sat high on his charger,He looked down on the little men;And the dwarfish and swarthy coupleLooked at the king again.Down by the shore he had them:And there on the giddy brink –“I will give thee life ye vermin,For the secret of the drink.”There stood the son and fatherAnd they looked high and low;The heather was red around them,The sea rumbled below.And up spoke the father,Shrill was his voice to hear:“I have a word in private,A word for the royal ear.“Life is dear to the aged,And honour a little thing;I would gladly sell the secret”,Quoth the Pict to the King.His voice was small as a sparrow’s,And shrill and wonderful clear:“I would gladly sell my secret,Only my son I fear.“For life is a little matter,And death is nought to the young;And I dare not sell my honour,Under the eye of my son.Take him, O king, and bind him,And cast him far in the deep;And it’s I will tell the secretThat I have sworn to keep.”They took the son and bound him,Neck and heels in a thong,And a lad took him and swung him,And flung him far and strongAnd the sea swallowed his body,Like that of a child of ten;And there on the cliff stood the father,Last of the dwarfish men.“True was the word I told you:Only my son I feared;For I doubt the sapling courage,That goes without the beard.But now in vain is the torture,Fire shall not avail:Here dies in my bosomThe secret of the Heather Ale.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms.
— Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here
All is changed, changed utterlyA terrible beauty is born
— W B Yeats, Collected Poems, by W. B. Yeats
The warrior must never get angry in war.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
On the ration cards of Nazi Germany, there was no listing for punishment, but everyone had to take their turn. For some it was death in a foreign country during the war. For others it was poverty and guilt when the war was over, when six million discoveries were made throughout Europe.
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned.
— Robert Charles Wilson, Burning Paradise
And now I demand that you do what the ignorant might feel is the easier thing. You must refrain from dying in battle. Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards. The dead are not your masters.
— Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are.
— Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?
Iturbide exclaimed: "Don't frighten me, General!""Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:"Just look at me.
— Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth
13)	Have you had your own, personal earthquake? Here is what it feels like. Your insides feel like they are stretched, ready to explode. And from outside, there is a crushing pressure that is holding you down, pinning you with a force that you’ve never known. You cannot breathe. You cannot move. You cannot understand any of the words that are being said to you. A water curtain falls in front of your face, as tears drench your eyes blurring everything in sight.
— Kirthi Jayakumar, The Doodler of Dimashq
And William says, "I lost one son utterly."... ..."So I've held my tongue. But the truth is you didn't go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn't even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, 'Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.
— Robert Olen Butler, Perfume River
A soldier never goes to war without his weapon.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
No one would deny that all wars and battles are regrettable acts of human folly, causing unjustifiable agony and distress to combatants and non-combatants alike-but these considerations should not preclude their serious study, if only to avoid the mistakes of the past which make such tragedies inevitable.
— David G. Chandler, A Guide to the Battlefields of Europe
Only in war does the madman become sane.
— Anthony  Ryan, Queen of Fire
The folks who hate the idea of women soldiers tell one set of lies, the people who like the notion of women at war tell a different set of lies. If you believe the one side, we’re nothing but a drag on the men, and the other side acts like we won the war all by ourselves. We could probably get a pretty good debate going here on the women’s war over the question of which se of lies we hate more—the one denies what we’ve done; the other belittles what our brother have done.
— Michael  Grant, Silver Stars
While the post-Civil War southerners were pushing as fast as they could into the New South, were grasping Yankee dollars with enthusiasm, they purified their motives in the well of Lost Causism. Politicians found it a bottomless source of bombast and ballots, preachers found it balm and solace to somewhat reluctant middle-class morals, writers found it a noble and salable theme.
— Frank E. Vandiver
Best to live and love by the maxim that 'silence in the face of evil is evil itself', but when it's evil fighting evil, let evil kill itself.
— Criss Jami
These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs – didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
The city gate opened when she and Harper reached the causeway. Her mind barely registered the new walls and the number of soldiers lining the ramparts who were cheering them. Oh, don’t, she wanted to tell them. We have lost so much.
— Carla Kelly, The Wedding Journey
I've survived revolution, war, and over a decade on this continent," the Burgrave reflected. "But by all the ghosts of the hundred emperors, I think fatherhood will finally do me in.
— Anthony  Ryan, The Waking Fire
War is ever the folly of the ignorant. But I have seen much to convince me some wars must be fought, to the bitterest end if need be.
— Anthony  Ryan, Queen of Fire
There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier
— Philippa Gregory, The White Queen
She felt the urge to tell him more, to explain about the abortions she had done after the war, and that she hadn’t realised until later, much later, that she had racked up a debt she was still struggling to repay. How could he know – he was just a soldier, he had killed as a matter of principle, but the war babies, the children of rape, had been left to junior doctors, the volunteers in ragged tents on the outskirts of town.
— Tahmima Anam, The Good Muslim
One of the special teams turned sadistic in Kandahar and took out a village. The organization reacted swiftly by shutting down the program and denying any and all knowledge. Contracts were severed. Their service records heavily redacted. Overnight, the entire team was out. Out of the military, out of the war, out of the only life they knew. Team Fear took the fall.
— Cindy Skaggs, Live By The Team
She talks in her most sedate voice, attempting to alleviate out fears, soothe our anxiety. She knows that if we are to survive watching this war from a distance, as spectators, we do not have the privilege of indignation or anxiety.
— Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors
In these myriad ways, we carved out our lives in Los Angeles. Yet falling asleep was often an act of travel, taking me quickly by the hand so that I am instantly surrounded by verdant foliage, the ocean's emerald roar, the voices of Alice, Mala, our grandmother. Those most familiar and beloved of women.But there are also nightmares. Over and over I dream of a small house, a glittering lagoon, a mango tree, and a young girl. She stands before me and her large bruised eyes do not leave mine. When she unpins the sari fold at her shoulder and pulls it away from her, I see sunset-colored bruises on her delicate clavicles. When she undoes her sari blouse, I see the grenades tucked like extra breasts under her own. It is grotesque. I wake trembling, and her eyes stays with me for hours.
— Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors
We were girls, you see, not even women, just girls, most of us when we started. And the boys were just boys, not men, most of them. We’d only begun to live life, we knew little and understood less. We were unformed, incomplete. It’s funny how easy it is to see that now. If you’d called me a child three years ago when this started I’d have been furious. But looking back? We were children just getting ready to figure out what adulthood was all about.
— Michael  Grant, Silver Stars
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.
— Tim O'Brien
This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside me now. The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill.
— Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Sarat smiled at the thought. "You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?""Come now," said Yousef. "Everyone fights an American war.
— Omar El Akkad, American War
Everyone fights an American war.
— Omar El Akkad, American War
I knew the eyes. I didn’t know the Kraut, but yeah, I sure knew that look. I see it when I look in the mirror, even now. If you stay too long in the way, it’s like your eyes try to get away, like they’re sinking down, trying to hide, wary little animals crawling into the cave of your eye socket.
— Michael  Grant, Silver Stars
Generals, on the average, are far less bellicose than journalists or patriotic housewives: They know the horrors of a war and they dislike any break in the routine
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived-not without reason-that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals-often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.
— Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918
It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men's minds.
— Omar El Akkad, American War
Iron has powers to draw a man to ruin
— Homer, The Odyssey
I was not descending in a plane, coming Home. I was watching an alien world as it ascended towards me - and one that I could never begin the process of readjusting to, because I knew that I would just as soon be returning to another world, whose normality was as alien to this home as I now was.
— Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War
The slow, mismanaged arrival of armored vehicles and bulletproof plates for flak vests was only the most conspicuous demonstration of how the Iraq War, like every war -- just or unjust, won or lost -- became a conspiracy of the old and powerful against the young and dutiful.
— George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing
— -it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?
We march through snow and we march through rain With naught to lose and naught to gain Sun and moon and sun again One day’s dawn is another day’s end   We come by day and we go by night We fall and rise again to fight Sword and spear and bow the same One man’s life is another man’s game   They fell like lightning and they raged like fire They lit the blaze on the funeral pyre Picked and chose the paths they trod One man’s will is another man’s blood  We live forever and we die todayWe’ve seen the end of eternity Time and fate outwit us all One man’s rise is another man’s fall
— Sarah Delena White, Halayda
My family says they are proud of me. Of course, I would rather hear this than the contrary, but I cannot say that I am proud of myself, so I find that I cannot 'talk about it'.
— Jake Wood, Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War
Ignorance, not sin, causes suffering. LIFT THE VEIL." ~ Lilli in the Great Theater
— Karen Clark, Singing in Silence: 2017's Summer Blockbuster
War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.
— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.
— Grace Paley
The casualty of war is our disappearing humanity.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?
— Terry Pratchett, The Long Mars
Things I fear will forever change and we old souls can do little but be swayed by the winds.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
I hear civilians saying we’re all heroes, heard someone… was it Arthur Godfrey on Armed Forces Radio? I can’t recall, but it’s nonsense anyway. If everyone is a hero, then no one is. Others say everyone below ground is a hero, but a lot of those were just green kids who spent an hour or a day on the battlefield before standing up when they shouldn’t have, or stepping where they shouldn’t have stepped. If there’s something heroic about stand up to scratch your ass and having some Kraut sniper ventilate your head, I guess I don’t see it. If by “hero”, you mean one of those soldiers who will follow an order to rush a Kraut machine gun or stuff a grenade in a tank hatch, well, that’s closer to meaning something. But the picture in your imagination, Gentle Reader, may not bear much similarity to reality. I knew a guy who did just that—jumped up on a Tiger tank and dropped a grenade (or was it two?) down the hatch. Blew the hell out of it too. But he’d just gotten a Dear John letter from his fiancée in the same batch of mail that informed him his brother had been killed. So I guess it was eight on the line between heroism and suicide.
— Michael  Grant, Silver Stars
What does our commitment to nonviolence mean as citizens of one of the most powerful and oppressive nations in recorded history?
— Mary Jo Bowman
They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.
— Marilyn French, The Women's Room
A civil war is, may we say, the prototype of all war, for in the persons of fellow citizens who happen to be the enemy we meet again, with the old ambivalence of love and hate and with all the old guilts, the blood brothers of our childhood. In a civil war – especially in one such as this when the nation shares deep and significant convictions and is not a mere handbasket of factions huddled arbitrarily together by historical happen-so – all the self-divisions of conflicts within individuals become a series of mirrors in which the plight of the country is reflected, and the self-division of the country a great mirror in which the individual may see imaged his own deep conflicts, not only the conflicts of political loyalties, but those more profoundly personal.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand ways the temper of American life today. This cost is psychological, and it is, of course, different for the winner and the loser.
— Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War
Vicary had decided he wanted to contribute. He wanted to do something instead of watching the world through his well-guarded window.
— Daniel Silva, The Unlikely Spy
I asked God "Why, why, why?" I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all. I had tasted the bitterest essence of war, the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered, and it filled me with disgust.” ― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
— Eugene Sledge
Nevertheless, four hours after dawn they began dying for their cause.
— Glen Cook, The Black Company
Let your peace be a victory!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
...when the black populations of the world have a future, so will the Western nations have a future-and not till then. But the terrible probability is that the Western populations, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will curse our names forever.
— James Baldwin
Nonviolence simply cannot defend property rights over human rights.
— David T. Dellinger
If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
The word is my weapon. FIRE!
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
Hell, any game that gives its players guns is probably not the kind that'll ever really let you go free.
— Jeanne Ryan, Nerve
What are we doing, burying bodies?" Admittedly, this would be a lace to do it. Isolated, off any main roads."Nope. We're going to war.
— Kelley York, Made of Stars
They would repair the leaks in their eyes.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Let my silence grow with noise as pregnant mothers grow with life. Let my silence permeate these walls as sunlight permeates a home. Let the silence rise from unwatered graves and craters left by bombs. Let the silence rise from empty bellies and surge from broken hearts. The silence of the hidden and forgotten. The silence of the abused and tortured. The silence of the persecuted and imprisoned. The silence of the hanged and massacred. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so the hungry may eat my words and the poor may wear my words. Loud as all the sounds can be, let my silence be loud so I may resurrect the dead and give voice to the oppressed. My silence speaks.
— Kamand Kojouri
We all knew the great lesson of history
—  I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
— Tim O'Brien
It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted … secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology … by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, “Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake,” but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more … The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms – it was only staged to look that way – but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite …
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
It is no longer a matter of if there is a war
—  it is a matter of who will strike next.
If we want to benefit most from our suffering, by prayer and meditation, we will approach our suffering as a good soldier approaches war. What do I mean by that? A good soldier who has trained and trained is not surprised when he fins himself in war! He has been trained for it. Likewise, consider it your Job to be be prepared to suffer. That puts a whole different cast on Sunday morning, doesn't it? You are gathering with God's people Lord's Day after Lord's Day to train as good soldiers of Jesus Christ so that when your time of trial and testing sand suffering comes, you will be ready.
— J. Ligon Duncan III, Does Grace Grow Best in Winter?
The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.
— Philip K. Dick, Mr. Spaceship
There were many human groups that did not go to war; the Eskimos never grasped the idea at all, and the American Indians never took to it well. But these dissenters were wiped out, and a cultural pattern was established that became the standard for the whole planet. Now it has become ingrained in us.
— Philip K. Dick
The more I allow myself to face that truth about my participation in a violent world, the more my faith and my intellect call me to humility and compassion rather than to doctrinaire ethics. I cannot hope for a clear conscience. I can only hope that my ethical choices are motivated by love rather than fear.
— Mary Jo Bowman
After Congress passed SJ Res 34, we are no longer merely battling a cyber-kinetic war on all fronts, we are now in a state of perpetual cyber-kinetic-meta war, and there will be no end.
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
People turned against each other cannot turn against those responsible.
— DaShanne Stokes
The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.
— Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
— Omar El Akkad, American War
I found the head nurse and asked her, and she said Dan has been flown back to America on account of they can take better care of him there. I asked her if he is okay, and she said, 'Yeah, if you can call two punctured lungs, a severed intestine, spinal separation, a missing foot, a truncated leg, and third degree burns over half the body okay, then he is just fine. I thanked her, and went on my way.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
Bubba then grabbed a hold of my leg and his eyes got all cloudy and that terrible pink sky seem to drain all the colour in his face. He was trying to say something, and so I bent over real close to hear what it was. But I never could make it out. So I asked the medic, ' You hear what he say?' And the medic say, 'Home. He said, home.' Bubba, he died, and that's all I got to say about that.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
At dawn, they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the shit damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all signed and burnt up - come running out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing and sweating and scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
After a while, they start landing some relief in helicopters, and I guess the napalm bomb have frightened away the gooks. They must of figured that if we was willing to do that to ourselves, then what the hell would we of done to them? They taking the wounded out of there, when along come Sergeant Kranz, hair all singed off, clothes burnt up, looking like he just got shot out of a cannon.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
War isn't hell. War is war, and Hell is hell, and not the two, war is a lot worse.
— Captain B. F. 'Hawkeye' Peirce, M*A*S*H
Kill someone on the behalf of yourself, you get deemed a murderer. Kill someone on behalf of your Government, you get deemed a hero.
— J.Adam Snyder
Never confuse fighting for one's government with fighting for one's country.
— J.Adam Snyder
There was some people hurt far worst than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
There was a guy next to my cot name of Dan, who had been blowed up inside a tank. He was all burnt and had tubes going in and out of him everyplace, but I never heard him holler. He talk real low and quiet, and after a day or so, him and me got to be friends. Dan came from the state of Connecticut, and he was a teacher of history when they grabbed him up and threw him into the Army. But because he was smart, they sent him to officer school and made him a lieutenant. Most of the lieutenants I know were about as simple minded as me, but Dan was different. He had his own philosophy about why we were here, which was that we were doing maybe the wrong thing for the right reasons, or vice-versa, but whatever it is, we ain't doing it right. Him being a tank officer and all, he say it ridiculous for us to be waging a war in a place where we can't hardly use our tanks on account of the land is mostly swamp or mountains. I told him about Bubba and all, and he nod his head very sadly and said there will be a lot more Bubbas to die before this thing is over.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
Lanser had been in Belgium and France twenty years before and he tried not to think what he knew—that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.
— John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down
War is very cruel, a predatory jungle, and is never the true path of life.
— Feng Nong
Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand - why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
Buruma is wise to recommend a balance of concessions and coordination in order to avoid war.
— Renate Bridenthal
The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, these bodies had become poisonous.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
From defilement can come much wisdom
— Ajahn Po
There is no bitterness in Wind In His Hair's heart," he began. "Our minds may choose different paths, but some part of every heart will always be as one. All my life I have been a warrior, and I will not change. I will not die as anything else."The whites have taken much from me. They have taken my brothers, my wives, my children. Now they want to take me off the earth upon which I walk. Maybe they will kill me now, and if they do, so be it. I will not take their hands. I will keep my ponies' tails tied up for war."- Wind In His Hair
— Michael Blake, The Holy Road
Words are weapons of war.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
delete the word War .rest is peace
— litymunshi
want a war ? please fall in love with your awaken soul
— litymunshi
I have suffered a loss, Forrest, far greater than my legs. It's my spirit, my soul, if you will. There is only a blank there now - medals where my soul used to be.
— Winston Groom, Forrest Gump
For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.
— Raymond Dean White, Impact
You can keep your paper promisesand all your worldly treasures.But you cannot buy peace of mindor escape from the headstone garden.Lyrics from "Headstone Garden" by the Troubled Land Band at the Independence Day celebration 12 years after the impact that destroyed civilization.
— Raymond Dean White, After the Dying Time
War isn't hell. War is war, and Hell is hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse.
— Captain B. F. 'Hawkeye' Peirce, M*A*S*H
There comes a time for each of us when we realize the truth about the enemy. Which is that he is not an idea, or some faceless demon. He is a man. And every man is much like ourselves.
— Brian Van Reet, Spoils
This is my war, and I don't know what side I'm on.
— Unknown
And what she understood-what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood-was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same-and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
— Omar El Akkad, American War
There are no miracles these days. Manna will not fall from the sky. Bombs, yes, enough to pierce our hearts, but manna, no.
— Chinelo Okparanta, Under the Udala Trees
I could have become a doctor, an engineer, a mechanic or even a car salesman but instead, I chose to be a soldier. Who was to blame? The way they glorified war back home could make anyone quit their job and join the army. The romanticized notions of being a soldier lasted till the time you had to take a life or two. After that, it all came crashing down and most of the men who signed up pulled their hair wondering why they bought into all this bullshit. We had no one to blame but ourselves. We wanted to serve this country and what better way to do it than to shoot, bomb and incinerate the enemy as our comrades fall next to us and a wife and mother somewhere hold on to a flag tightly and shed tears of loss. There was no glory in war, there was only death. These designations and medals were like magnets on a refrigerator. They didn’t mean a thing to the children who were orphaned or wives who were widowed. They didn’t mean a thing to soldiers who walked home after years on a battlefield to find their wives in bed with someone else. Yet we kept going forward, obeying every order pushed down our throats… fighting, killing.
— Shayne Colaco, Nightmare
There was no right or wrong during war. The setting sun made me realize that the ones who would live to see a new day would be the ones who are victorious. As with all the history of this world, the ones who won were always right.
— Shayne Colaco, Nightmare
If you create an environment of conflicts, I don’t think you will enjoy peace yourself.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
If you promote peace and progress for others, I don’t think you will have sleepless nights.
— Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts
There’s more.”“Of course there is,” Brishen said flatly. It had started badly; it turned worse and hinted at becoming ruinous.
— Grace Draven, Eidolon
YOU HAVE KILLEDYOU HAVE STOLENYOU HAVE DESTROYED.DEVOURER OF LIVESDEVOURER OF SOULSYOU ARE DEFEATED!ROAR O LION OF JUDAHPROCLAIM YOUR VICTORY!CHILDREN OF ADAM BEHOLD...BEHOLD THY SALVATION.FOR GREAT IS THE DAY OF THE LORD.TURN AND FOLLOW THE CHILDAS LION LIES WITH LAMB.O SWORD BE A PLOUGHO SPEAR BE A PRUNING HOOK"EDUCATORS" SILENCE!WE SHALL LEARN WAR NO MORE.
— David  Holdsworth
Do you want to know what General Putnam is thinking? It’s this. He’s thinking that he can’t win the war if he doesn’t keep the people on his side. He’s thinking that he can’t keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population—raping the women, stealing cattle, burning houses. He is determined to scare the wits out of the troops to keep them in line. And he’s thinking that it doesn’t matter very much who he executes to do it. So many men have died, so many mothers have wept, so many brothers and sisters have cried. He is thinking that in the long run if he executes somebody, he’ll shorten the war and save more lives. It doesn’t matter to him very much who he executes; one man’s agony is like another’s, one mother’s tears are no wetter than anybody else’s. And that’s why he’s going to have Sam shot.
— James Lincoln Collier, My Brother Sam Is Dead
This peculiar connexion between a certain view of woman and the European conception of war has had profound consequences for morality, education, and politics.
— Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World
That afternoon, long after the stool has been put away and the waltzes have stopped, while Werner sits with his transceiver listening to nothing, a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six or seven years old, small for her age, with big clear eyes that remind him of Jutta’s. She runs across the street to the park and plays there alone, beneath the budding trees, while her mother stands on the corner and bites the tips of her fingers. The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
It’s something of a cliché, at least among war correspondents, that war makes people unusually horny; what it actually does is make you want to touch as much flesh as you can get your hands on.
— David Burr Gerrard, Short Century: A Novel
Wouldn’t it have been better to conserve your strength and rest?” Ildiko mused after a moment. “I’ll sleep long and hard when I’m dead. You defy death by celebrating life.
— Grace Draven, Eidolon
This idea struck me: the army is the body : I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting. (15 May 1940)
— Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1936-1941
Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940)
— Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1936-1941
...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
I come and stand at every door But none can hear my silent tread I knock and yet remain unseen For I am dead for I am dead I'm only seven though I died In Hiroshima long ago I'm seven now as I was then When children die they do not grow My hair was scorched by swirling flame My eyes grew dim my eyes grew blind Death came and turned my bones to dust And that was scattered by the wind I need no fruit I need no rice I need no sweets nor even bread I ask for nothing for myself For I am dead for I am dead All that I need is that for peace You fight today you fight today So that the children of this world Can live and grow and laugh and 
— Nâzım Hikmet
You've been so used to fighting Wars with a gun in your hand that you forget to put it down. Not every fight requires a weapon of some kind, and not everything is a fight.
— Lori Llewellyn
War! Someone's making a hell of a lot of money.
— Anthony T. Hincks
War is a dumb game thought out by men when they become too old to play cowboys and crooks.
— Irma Joubert, Persomi
Bombs and bullets don't discriminate.
— Sophie Masson, 1914
Truth is the first casualty of war.
— Sophie Masson, 1914
The war never leaves.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
War is a monster. War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows. And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
— Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
All nineteen-year-old males are children who are men capable of war.
— David Burr Gerrard, Short Century: A Novel
And isn't love between two people better than hatred, in this world of violence and mourning? There seemed to me a fragile kindness in their love that survived through this poisonous war. Even though one of them hadn't.
— Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir
Before the war, she'd never have gone out in the rain and happily stood in it. Now, it was a reminder that she was alive...
— Soraya Lane, Wives Of War
Women endure the labor of childbirth and men send themselves to war! But I gave birth to eight children and never once did I cry like I saw some of those men out there before they even fired their first shot! I think it has something to do with the unnaturalness of killing compared to the naturalness of giving birth.
— Ana Castillo, So Far from God
I answered the call to heal before I answered the call of duty to my country. My job is to help and heal, not to destroy.
— Jesseca Wheaton, A Place Called Lonesome
This war is going to be full of women who fall in love with men they'll never see again. All we do is say goodbye over and over.
— Soraya Lane, Wives Of War
Every war, every plague is God’s judgment. But every man who rises up to stop the wars and the plagues is God’s instrument. Human action is God’s will, not blind indifference in the face of suffering.
— John   Kramer
A third-grader when WWII started, I was also waging my own "war effort." It was deeply magical thinking—I really thought what I did or didn't do could save lives, win battles, bring my dad and uncles home safe. And conversely, that if I screwed up, they were all in greater danger.
— Ann Medlock
When we fight wars, money is no object. When we choose peace, we ration every penny.
— Joel Berg
As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons
I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.
— Nancy Wake
My loves have always been seared with this singing, this singing written by death, the way some lands have always been crippled by war.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
Copying Juvven’s gaze over the treetops at the edge of the shooting range, he saw the fields of Flanders before his inner eye. “Yes, the wide horizon…” The memory made the corners of his mouth curl slightly. “…and in the night, you lie there, snuggled into the hay, and there is this huge sky above you.” He stared into the past, ignoring Juvven swivel his head to watch him and continued, “Although you are in the middle of war, death, and destruction, you can positively feel the velvet of the dark vault above you. And in it, like falling coins or lights carried by other beings, twinkle the stars, beckoning you to lift your hand and touch them, to feel happy and safe with them.” He broke off and turned to Juvven, without seeing him, still lost in his memories. “They gave a sense of security and…hope, I think. As if the Earth and the sky cradled me, telling me I was protected by them.
— Bealevon Nolan, A Night Sky Full of Stars
Perhaps there is something good that had come from this war: everything has been turned around, all the unfairness made grimly plain. It has given us everyday women a voice - dared us to stand up for ourselves, and to stand up for others. We have less to lose in this world of chaos and death, after all.
— Jennifer Ryan, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir
Hey Americans,” he screamed furiously at the drones. “Brothers of the wolf, sisters of the wind, children of the Sun! Send the Choctaw warrior a quick and merciful death, instead of abandoning us into slavery or shameful capture.
— George Sorbane
War is when people kill one another, right? Why would they do that?
— Tsukumizu, Girls' Last Tour, Vol. 1
It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments
—  our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.
…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face.
— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays
We’ll stand before the piles of stones that used to be weapons, and we’ll build an altar.
— Sarah Bessey, Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women
They were willing to send men and women to death to avoid being called losers.
— Steve Sheinkin, Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War
There is no Situation in which Arms can get an Answer. Arms only ensure, that there would Never be an Answer.
— Vineet Raj Kapoor