c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently. She thought she’d been surviving. She thought that she’d been fighting for herself. But all she’d done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon … not for their lives, but for their souls” (p. 403)
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
How goddamn foolish it is, the war. They's no war in the worth that's worth fightin' for. I don't care where it is. They can't tell me any different. Money, money is the thing that causes it all. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that the people that start wars and promote 'em are the men that make the money, make the ammunition, make the clothing and so forth. Just think of the poor kids that are starvin' to death in Asia and so forth that could be fed with how much you make one big shell of. ~Alvin "Tommy" Bridges
— Studs Terkel
Remember, though, that you are the king's observer, not the king's champion.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
The president has listened to some people, the so-called Vulcans in the White House, the ideologues. But you know, unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek who made the decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren't Vulcans. There are Klingons in the White House. But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own. Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to war.
— David Wu
But you didn’t mention Orrigar I, the first king of the House of Chaldarina. He put an end to years of unrest and civil strife. Neither did you mention Ronnick II, the one who reformed the monetary system and forbade the Great Houses to mint their own coins, thus stabilizing our currency. At the time it saved Ximerion from going bankrupt.” “I’m sorry. I told you we weren’t big—” “It’s not that, Hemarchidas. You remembered the fighting kings, those who brought war, destruction and ephemeral glory. Or those who ended tragically. You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn’t feel embarrassed, though. So did history.” Hemarchidas looked at his friend as if he saw him for the first time. “So, all in all, Hemarchidas, I’d rather history forgot me.
— Andrew Ashling
We piled aboard the small chopper and after a bit of map pointing to the pilot we lifted off. "I love the RAF," said Jed."I love them too, sir," said I. After a short flight the chopper landed. We all got out and waved our thanks and farewells to the crew and Major Jenner checked his map. After a quick examination he announced that we had been dropped in the wrong place."I fucking hate the RAF," said Jed."I fucking hate them too, sir," said I.
— Ken Lukowiak, A Soldiers Song: True Stories From The Falklands
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Mudwoman
There is only one way to win a war which has begun: To stop it immediately
—  that is the way!
Instead he felt only love. And that was the miracle. The surge in hatred since the war began had created more love around it. It was indomitable, mad, and everlasting, scattered through the rich and the poor, deep and calm in the Quakers, hot and fierce in the mothers, faithful in the warriors, wistful in the pets, seeping its way into mercy and atrocity, destroying things, rebuilding them.
— Kathy Hepinstall
This time we'll be fighting for the nation. The company commander says that it's better to be the ghost of a fallen soldier than a nationless slave. For the sake of our fellow countrymen, our families and our children, we have to resist to the very end... ("Vague Expectations")
— Xiao Hong, Selected Stories Of Xiao Hong
War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.
— Robert Graff
For 1,300 days of Sarajevo's drama, important people in the world who were supposed to act kept their eyes closed, ... But not you. You were not silent. Your voice was clear.
— Alijia Izetbegovic
Wars are the strongest evidence for the claim that man is still a wild animal.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Are there anything more dishonourable and more coward than not marching in front of the army after taking the decision of war as a politician? Sending others for dying but keeping himself in safety is the affair of the low man only!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Every time a war ends, under a beautiful sun, on the face of a crying child; I see a rainbow of hope over the innocent teardrops.
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world.
— Douglas MacArthur
History is a symptom of our disease
— Mao Zedong
As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.
— Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
War is merely the continuation of politics by other means
— Carl von Clausewitz
Through the years our business has been killing
— -it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.
His angelic wings blackened when the dark fury assailed his mind. Summoning new strength from the unholy power that ravaged his soul, grieved to drastic levels of desperation by the tainting of the holy light within him, he combated ally and enemy alike, bent on destroying both sides in order to ensure the quelling of the dark energies there and then. For days and nights, the lone warrior bathed himself in the blood of angels and demons. And when it was over, he stood alone on contaminated land, with a contaminated soul. He was banned forever from Heaven and not even Hell had space for a creature which seemed to cherish Oblivion over Pandemonium. The dark angel, not so far removed from his former self as his superiors seemed to believe, died on the edge of the cliffs, of utter loneliness and despair.
— T.A. Miles, Raventide
I don't believe war is a way to solve problems. I think it's wrong. I don't have respect for the people that made the decisions to go on with war. I don't have that much respect for Bush. He's about war, I'm not about war - a lot of people aren't about war.
— Avril Lavigne
For no matter how many battles had been won or lost, no matter how many friends and soldiers killed, every battle felt like the first. And I realized that it wasn't the training, nor the pain of seeing friends die, nor the will to win that made the men fight, but their will to survive that made them soldiers.
— Magus Guidan, Legend of the Phoenix: Rise of Crescent
I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 
— Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled,Followed their mercenary callingAnd took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended;They stood, and earth's foundations stay;What God abandoned, these defended,And saved the sum of things for pay.
— A.E. Housman
There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.""So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?""Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.
— John le Carré, The Russia House
Those are the men,' added Bolkonsky with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they went out of the palace, 'those are the men who decide the fate of nations.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat with his boot, so he tells himself, sometimes successfully.
— Diana Gabaldon, The Scottish Prisoner
Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get.
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
But to us of a later generation...it is inconceivable that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other, because Napoleon was ambitious, Alexander firm, English policy crafty, and the Duke of Oldenburg hardly treated. We cannot grasp the connections between these circumstances and the bare fact of murder and violence, nor why the duke's wrongs should induce thousands of men from the other side of Europe to pillage and murder the inhabitants of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces and to be slaughtered by them.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
— George Orwell, 1984
I run through the woods, at once applauding myself for my wit-""Well deserved, sir. Well deserved.""And at the self instant, I am grinding my teeth because I am a vain, revenging idiot and shall be run down because of it.
— M.T. Anderson, The Kingdom on the Waves
We prayed these wars would end all wars --In war we know is no rom
— Mark Knopfler, Golden Heart
One man can not wage a war alone. Therefore if humanity stops agreeing to go to war
—  there will be only peace.
I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.
— Christopher Hitchens
But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousands and millions of suggestions and supposition are now forgotten that were current at the period, but have been shown by time to be unfounded and so have been consigned to oblivion.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
There will always be another war, Gillia.” He allowed his cynicism to seep through. “Do you know why? Because there will always be bigots and cowards and power-mad devils in positions of omnipotence. Look around you. There has been war here since time began. It’s nature. Animals kill each other for survival, for territory… and for the taste of blood in their mouths. Man is no different.
— V.S. Carnes
They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.
— Bob Massie
All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him--the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing. Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it. A bird sang.
— Susan Dexter
You must learn to end the wars in your world by ending them in your minds.
— Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living
This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing at all besides other wars - the last or the next.
— John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy' is benevolent, can you now?
— John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
No man is a man until he has been a soldier.
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
I see this as the central issue of our time: how to find a substitute for war in human ingenuity, imagination, courage, sacrifice, patience...War is not inevitable, however persistent it is, however long a history it has in human affairs. It does not come out of some instinctive human need. It is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort--by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion--to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
The nicest veterans in Schenectady, I thought, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who'd really fought.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonorable peace
—  and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.
He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why.
— J.M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K
Many of you would like to take evil and step on it, destroying it like you would a bug. Squish, smash! Begone into another reality! This practice of eliminating human life because it is perceived as evil does you no good. In the end your history and experience are filled with war of one kind or another; humans fighting one another for the right to speak their truth and share their perception.And one human or another is always wanting to suppress someone else's ideas, someone else's thinking.
— Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living
This was one of the casualties of war, that trust itself seemed to die a thousand deaths.
— Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac.""I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked.""So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff.""There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith.""I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit.""But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?
— A.J. Kazinski, The Last Good Man
It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.
— Ulysses S. Grant, The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die?
— Clare B. Dunkle, The Sky Inside
Risk is the factor of a stratagem measured by what man is powerless to control.
— Mike  Norton, White Mountain
You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well contentBy any jest of mine. These men are worthYour tears:You are not worth their merriment.
— Wilfred Owen, Poems
Inman's only thought looking on the enemy was, "Go home.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own.
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Sun Over Breda
I wonder where he lies. Wedged under a rock, with a thousand small mouths already sucking on his spongy flesh. Or floating still, on and down, on and down, to wider, calmer reaches of the river. I see them gathering: the drowned, the shot. Their hands float out to touch each other, fingertip to fingertip. In a day, two days, they will glide on, a funeral flotilla, past the unfinished white dome rising out of its scaffolds on a muddy hill in Washington. Will the citizens recognize them, the brave fallen, and uncover in a gesture of respect? Or will they turn away, disgusted by the bloated mass of human rot?
— Geraldine Brooks, March
Vietnam...war...it did something to us. Or maybe not. Maybe the bad seeds were always in me, and war gave them a dark place in which to grow.
— Kristin Hannah, Summer Island
Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it hardly mattered. The leading Danes tripped on the hidden timbers and the men behind pushed the falling men forward. I kicked one in the face, feeling my iron-reinforced boot crush bone. Danes were sprawling at our feet while others tried to get past their fallen comrades to reach our line, and we were killing. Two men succeeded in reaching us, despite the smoking barricade, and one of those two feel to Wasp-Sting coming up from beneath his shield-rim. He had been swinging an ax that the man behind me caught on his shield and the Dane was still holding the war ax's shaft as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I twisted the blade, ripping it upward, and as Cerdic, beside me, chopped his own ax down. The man with the crushed face was holding my ankle and I stabbed at him as the blood spray from Cerdic's ax blinded me. The whimpering man at my feet tried to crawl away, but Finan stabbed his sword into his thigh, then stabbed again. A Dane had hooked up his ax over the top rim of my shield and hauled it down to expose my body to a spear-thrust, but the ax rolled off the circular shield and the spear was deflected upward and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward again, felt her bite, twisted her, and Finan was keening his mad Irish song as he added his own blade to the slaughter. “Keep the shields touching!” I shouted at my men.
— Bernard Cornwell, Death of Kings
The war had made some into libertines and some into serious, sober men.
— Charles Bracelen Flood, Lee The Last Years
In the midst of the heavy, hot fragrance of summer, and of the clean salty smell of the sea, there was the odor of wounded men, a sickly odor of blood and antiseptics which marked the zone of every military hospital. All Athens quickly took on that odor, as the wounded Greek soldiers were moved out of hospitals and piled into empty warehouses to make way for German wounded. Now every church, every empty lot, every school building in Athens is full of wounded, and on the pathways of Zappion, the park in the heart of Athens, bandaged men in makeshift wheel chairs are to be seen wherever one walks. Zappion is a profusion of flowers, heavy-scented luxurious flowers; but even the flower fragrance is not as strong as that of blood.
— Betty Wason, Miracles in Hellas: The Greeks Fight On
The Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe
— Louis Mountbatten
Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?
— David Mitchell, Ghostwritten
War has changed.It's no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It's an endless series of proxy battles, fought by mercenaries and machines.War--and it's consumption of life--has become a well-oiled machine.War has changed.ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities.Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control…everything is monitored and kept under control.War…has changed.The age of deterrence has become the age of control, all in the name of averting catastrophe from weapons of mass destruction, and he who controls the battlefield, controls history.War…has changed.When the battlefield is under total control, war becomes routine.
— David Hayter
There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again
— Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
No, but why is Croft that way?  Oh there are The Answers. He is that way because of the-corruption-of-the-society. He is that way because he is having problems of adjustment. It is because he is a Texan. It is because he has renounced God. He is that way because he was born that way, or because the Devil has claimed him for one of his own, or because the only woman he ever loved was untrue to him.
— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.
— Michael Kazin, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.
— Winston S. Churchill
The American intellectuals, in their preoccupation with reality, seem to have forgotten that the real enemy is War rather than imperial Germany. There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade. What shall we do with leaders who tell us that we go to war in moral spotlessness or who make “democracy” synonymous with a republican form of government?
— Randolph Bourne
Some readers may have noticed an icy little missive from Noam Chomsky ["Letters," December 3], repudiating the very idea that he and I had disagreed on the "roots" of September 11. I rush to agree. Here is what he told his audience at MIT on October 11:Clever of him to have spotted that (his favorite put-down is the preface 'Turning to the facts...') and brave of him to have taken such a lonely position. As he rightly insists, our disagreements are not really political.
— Christopher Hitchens
They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.
— Henryk Sienkiewicz, In Desert and Wilderness
All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.
— Karen Chamberlain
On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.
— Lyn Macdonald, The Roses of No Man's Land
Engage the enemy more closely.
— Charles Faddis
This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman's journey north was merely the beginning.
— Jeffrey Whittam, Sons of Africa
For after all, why do we go on fighting? If we die for democracy then we must be one of the democracies. Let the rest fight with us, if that is the case. But the most powerful of them, the only one that could save us, chooses to bide its time. Very good. That is its right. But by so doing, that democracy signifies that we are fighting for ourselves alone. And we go on fighting despite the assurance that we have lost the war. Why, then, do we go on dying? Out of despair? But there is no despair. You know nothing about defeat if you think there is room in it for despair.There is a verity that is higher than the pronouncements of the intelligence. There is a thing which pierces and governs us and which cannot be grasped by the intelligence. A tree has no language. We are a tree. There are truths which are evident, though not to be put into words. I do not die in order to obstruct the path of the invasion, for there is no shelter upon which I can fall back with those I love. I do not die to preserve my honor, since I deny that my honor is at stake, and I challenge the jurisdiction of my judge. Nor do I die out of desperation.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.
— Sebastian Barry, On Canaan's Side
The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare
—  the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.
The 'pre-emption' versus 'prevention' debate may be a distinction without much difference. The important thing is to have it understood that the United States is absolutely serious. The jihadists have in the past bragged that America is too feeble and corrupt to fight. A lot is involved in disproving that delusion on their part.
— Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore.
— John Darnton, Almost a Family: A Memoir
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.
— Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Nothing—not even the US Army—more threatens the future of a democratic, pluralistic and (dare we wish, secular) Iraq than the political ascendancy of Islamic fascists like Al Sadr.
— Marc Cooper
The only thing worse than a Mexican Stand Off is a Peace Pact that Fails!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
When it comes to world news, attitude is what marks the distinction between justice and vengeance. Justice is pure, but vengeance brings more ruin.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting.
— William Faulkner, The Unvanquished
Military foolishness is ultimately suicidal. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality, that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.
— Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.
— Alfred Thayer Mahan
Just because your electronics are better than ours, you aren't necessarily superior in any way. Look, imagine that you humans are a man in LA with a brand-new Trujillo and we are a nuhp in New York with a beat-up old Ford. The two fellows start driving toward St. Louis. Now, the guy in the Trujillo is doing 120 on the interstates, and the guy in the Ford is putting along at 55; but the human in the Trujillo stops in Vegas and puts all of his gas money down the hole of a blackjack table, and the determined little nuhp cruises along for days until at last he reaches his goal. It's all a matter of superior intellect and the will to succeed. Your people talk a lot about going to the stars, but you just keep putting your money into other projects, like war and popular music and international athletic events and resurrecting the fashions of previous decades. If you wanted to go into space, you would have.
— George Alec Effinger, Live! from Planet Earth
I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird – that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war.
— George Orwell, Coming Up for Air
The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.
— Herman Melville, Typee, Omoo, Mardi
The debacle in Iraq has reinforced the realist dictum, disparaged by idealists in the 1990s, that the legacies of geography, history and culture really do set limits on what can be accomplished in any given place. But the experience in the Balkans reinforced an idealist dictum that is equally true: One should always work near the limits of what is possible rather than cynically give up on any place. In this decade idealists went too far; in the previous one, it was realists who did not go far enough.
— Robert D. Kaplan
What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor...
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
The Northwestern Carpathians, in which I was raised, were a hard place, as unforgiving as the people who lived there, but the Alpine landscape into which Zlee and I were sent that early winter seemed a glimpse of what the surface of the earth looked and felt and acted like when there were no maps or borders, no rifles or artillery, no men or wars to claim possession of land, and snow and rock alone parried in a match of millennial slowness so that time meant nothing, and death meant nothing, for what life there was gave in to the forces of nature surrounding and accepted its fate to play what role was handed down in the sidereal march of seasons capable of crushing in an instant what armies might--millennia later--be foolish enough to assemble on it heights.And yet there we were, ordered to march ourselves, for God, not nature, was with us now, and God would deliver us, in this world and next, when the time came for that.
— Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn
It turned out to be a war which, unfortunately for Comrade Pillai, would end almost before it began. Victory was gifted to him wrapped and beribboned, on a silver tray. Only then, when it was too late, and Paradise Pickles slumped softly to the floor without so much as a murmur or even the pretense of resistance, did Comrade Pillai realize that what he really needed was the process of war more than the outcome of victory. War could have been the stallion that he rode, part of, if not all, the way to the Legislative Assembly, whereas victory left him no better off than when he started out.He broke the eggs but burned the omelette.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven't stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military conflicts, it's almost impossible to define victory. You can't document the war's progress on a world map or chart it on a historical timetable in a way that makes any sense. A country used to a feeling of being in command and control has been whipsawed into a state of perpetual reaction, swinging wildly between passive fear and fevered, often thoughtless, activity, at a high cost to its self-confidence.
— George Packer
It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named War's End Day or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.
— Claire Holden Rothman, The Heart Specialist
I had often thought that if I managed to live through the war I wouldn't expect too much of life. How could one resent disappointment in love if life itself was continuously in doubt? Since Belgorod, terror had overturned all my preconceptions, and the pace of life had been so intense one no longer knew what elements of ordinary life to abandon in order to maintain some semblance of balance. I was still unresigned to the idea of death, but I had already sworn to myself during moments of intense fear that I would exchange anything - fortune, love, even a limb - if I could simply survive.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
It is a foible of our human nature that when we have an extremely unpleasant experience, it gives us a peculiar satisfaction if it is “the biggest” of its disagreeable kind that has happened since the world began. During a heat wave, for instance, we are very pleased if the papers announce that it is “the highest temperature reached since the year 1881,” and we feel a little resentment towards the year 1881 for having gone us one better. Or if our ears are frozen till all the skin peels off, it fills us with a certain happiness to learn that “it was the hardest frost recorded since 1786.” It is just the same with wars. The war in progress is either the most righteous or the bloodiest, or the most successful, or the longest, since such and such a time; any superlative whatever always affords us the proud satisfaction of having been through something extraordinary and record-breaking.
— Karel Čapek, The Absolute at Large
Warriors are warriors not because of their strengh, but because of their ability strengh to good purpose
— Eric Greitens, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL
The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact, several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak 'the same language' in real terms.
— Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future
See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry.
— Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly
It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting—other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Armageddon in Retrospect
This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.
— Isabel Allende, La suma de los días
On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
— Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger: The Loss of Linguistic Diversity and the Threat to Our Future
That war [Bosnian war] in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested.
— Christopher Hitchens
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
There were people dying everywhere getting massacred in every town and village, there were people being picked up and thrown into dark jails in unknown parts, there were dungeons in the city where hundreds of young men were kept in heavy chains and from where many never emerged alive, there were thousands who had disappeared leaving behind women with photographs and perennial waiting ,there were multitudes of dead bodies on the roads, in hospital beds, in fresh martyrs' graveyards and scattered casually on the snow of mindless borders.
— Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.
— José Ramos-Horta, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win, we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluable, we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred conviction that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every men with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
(On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total population, had been killed.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since...I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies.
— Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
Sometimes, a war saves people.
— José Ramos-Horta, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.
— Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark & Termite
I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.
— Adam Michnik
He had volunteered early, rather than waiting to be conscripted, for he felt a duty and an obligation to serve, and believed that ... being willing to fight for his country and the liberty it represented, would make some small difference. ... His idealism was one of the casualties of the carnage [of Verdun].
— Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio
He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Galapagos
Mawdryn stared at the Brigadier with such a look of pain and longing. For a moment the old soldier's mind went back thirty-five years to his first taste of action as a young lieutenant in Palestine, with his platoon badly shot up by terrorists, and he remembered the mangled conscript who screamed at the officer to take his rifle and kill him.
— Peter Grimwade, Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead
He'd imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it kept him going, that thought of peace. He'd believed in it like a season he knew it would arrive one day
— Amanda Hodgkinson, 22 Britannia Road
Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.
— Jan Narveson, A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness they were beaten down and met with disappointment again and again—their lives were not available for use as an illustration. Theirs were not stories that could be read as an affirmation of another system.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
What does the corpse care who was right and who was wrong?
— Manuel Azaña
Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.
— Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
If water won't smother the blazeFather, take my tears and bestow them on the firesee if the fires will wither.
— Zakariya Amataya, No Women in Poetry
It is interesting how one word can spark memories that one believes she has buried beyond recognition. War reminded me of the sharp and bittersweet smell of burning homes, temples, and palaces. It made my eyes cloud over with a haze of dense smoke, kicked up dirt as people went running and careening around corners, and the flashing colors of different garments as citizens ran in all directions, their lives suddenly meaningless. The word war made me twelve years old again and frightened beyond sanity.
— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney, Asha in Time
Nothing is more prejudicial to war than talk.
— Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain