c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
As long as the forest stood the Tchetchens were unconquerable... and it is literally the fact that they were beaten in the long run not by the sword but by the axe.
— John F. Baddeley
...and to this day the rare traveller who knows the language and customs even of the worst of the tribes is safer amongst them than in the neighbouring Cossack settlements.
— John F. Baddeley
Hospitality, as with all the mountain tribes, was - and is still - a most sacred duty; and the man who would slay a chance-met traveller without pity or remorse for the sake of trifling gain, would lay down his life for the very same individual were he to cross his threshold as even an unbidden guest.
— John F. Baddeley
Nationalism leads to all sorts of nasty things (even Nazi things) like fascism and war.
— Christina Engela, Dead Man's Hammer
Peace with non-fundamentalists terrifies the fundamentalist because to them, being Christian doesn't mean just being 'good' - it means being 'better' than others. Being better that others means having to see them as enemies - and making war on them. The fundamentalist views not being allowed to make war on their enemies as oppression of their faith, or defeat.
— Christina Engela, Fearotica: An Anthology of Erotic Horror
There was, for many of us, a great escape in reading about the fantastic and supernatural during wartime. Terrors more terrible than those we were living through gave us an outlet for our anxiety.
— M.J. Rose, The Secret Language of Stones
They called it the Great War, but that implied worthiness and grandeur, not violence and helplessness and the utter waste and devastation our country, our city, our people endured.
— M.J. Rose, The Secret Language of Stones
If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.
— Milan Kundera, Immortality
What is life but an ongoing war?
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
But the huge bowl of the sky remains untracked: no zeppelins, no bombers, no superhuman paratroopers, just the last songbirds returning from their winter homes, and the quicksilver winds of spring transmuting into the heavier, greener breezes of summer.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.
— Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla
How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends.
— Christina Engela, Dead Man's Hammer
In big ways and small, I knew exactly how selfish a war could make me, and I saw all around me how fear and need drove other people to terrible betrayals. Yet over and over, I also saw how war created a community, a people, and how that community was nourished by gestures of sharing. It was sharing that didn't depend on personal intimacy, and a community that didn't depend on everyone's being friends; it foreshadowed what I would come to understand as church, at its best.
— Sara  Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
how does this outer life, apocalypse reported, penetrate my dreams
— Ron Silliman, Revelator
She had thought she knew what war was, but as their empty eyes and too-thin bodies etched themselves onto her soul, Vhalla realized she knew nothing at all. They were all boys and girls playing at war, writing their own songs the bards would sing. But the bards never sang about this. Suddenly the faces of the people she had killed came back to her. We are monsters.
— Elise Kova, Earth's End
This is the first rule of the last war:Trust No One
— Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view . . . is not enough; what matters even more is . . . adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards." — as quoted in "High Financier" by Niall Ferguson
— Siegmund Warburg
We came to save the sacred writings. - Essenes to Eleazar, on collecting the Dead Sea Scrolls from the burning Temple. Jerusalem, 70 CE.
— Joseph Shellim, Ben Hur II: Exile
Who was Hitler" demanded little Tracy"He was this bloke in World War Two" explained Ben.
— Jackie French, Hitler's Daughter
The Chilcot report is a revelation of injustice under the cloak of Aid. The Chilcot report is a sorry report on the current state of humanity. So the ultimate question here is – what are we going to achieve out of the sorry reports when “sorry” has no meaning in action?
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
In my view, any government whose state is perpetually at war, and remains so in spite of initiatives to make peace, is incompetent and unfit and should resign.
— Christina Engela
Why did you do this?" He was shaking. "Just tell me why."I tried to muster up some of the righteous indignation that I'd felt on Friday night as I said, "You knocked over my gravestone!" But even to my ears the words sounded tinny and pathetic.Dan's face was pale. "It was just a gravestone, Chelsea. And it was a mistake. I told you that already, and I meant it. I've never lied to you. My God, can't you tell the difference between a gravestone and a person you love? Can't you tel which one matters?"But if I had to point to the real problem in my life, it's that I've never known the difference between a gravestone and a person I love. I have never known which is which until it's too late. "All's fair in love and war," I reminded him, aiming for Tawny's tone. But my voice came out sounding just like me."Oh, yeah? And which is this?" he asked. "Love or war?
— Leila Sales, Past Perfect
It may be said without exaggeration that the mountains made the men; and the men in return fought with passionate courage and energy in defence of their beloved mountains, in whose fastnesses, indeed, they were well-nigh unconquerable.
— John F. Baddeley
I'm not a hero but I can end the war
— Sally Green, Half Lost
...Prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think, how sweet, how fine, how good this is... and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams... Prophecy will bite your prick off everytime,
— George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
Trouble cannot be avoided, you either go looking for it or it will come looking for you.
— Constance Friday
You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.
— J.D. Salinger
There are some great positive quotes out there that I can't quite share as I wonder how a victim in a war torn country could be expected to see from their perspective?
— Jay Woodman
..there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
— Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain
He stood in rain and the storm, watching a demon with his face standing and laughing at him on a chariot run by drunk horses. The storm threw dust into his eyes, while the demon unleashed the horses one after the other at him.
— Akshay Vasu
Morality is decided by the victors
— Ian V Hamrick
the greatest trick of kings is to fool the poor into thinking we have common cause with the rich simply because we live on the same bog. Then the poor get their heads split open in the battles they fight so the rich can keep their wine cellars well stocked.
— Kate Horsley, The Changeling
Inside, I screamed for help but the words knew better than to escape my lips.
— Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir of a Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016
We thought we'd seen it all. The real horror of war is always waiting for you at home. It's waiting, I tell you. We were so damned happy when we got back. We'd made it. We survived. But it's always waiting. Waiting. You let down your guard. And there it is. You can't ever let up. Give up.
— James          Anderson, The Never-Open Desert Diner
I have no clue if it's true and I don't much want to look, but I bet a war happens inside the cocoon.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
War is more than battles, and battles are more than violence.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Nobility
He was a nobody. Yet and still, he held the gun and therfore all of the power.
— Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir of a Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016
In war, love is a luxury. It comes at a high price... This brand of marriage, I guess, takes steady nerves.
— Emily Yellin, Our Mothers' War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II
He could feel the Great Iron War coming to an end now, but he no longer had his finger on the button. The curtains of the world were about to close, and the play of life would soon be over. There would be no applause.
— Dean F. Wilson, Worldwaker
A new age is approaching, and its advent might make us pray to go back to the days of the trenches. Once the Worldwaker goes off, we will never be able to sleep again.
— Dean F. Wilson, Worldwaker
VOA no longer felt like a sanctuary but rather a mirage and we were desert wanderers.
— Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir of a Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016
We were all pawns easily discarded at the whims of monsters, some of whom were younger than me.
— Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir of a Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016
That youthful enthusiasm for the Resistance was killed off quick in new recruits, if they were not killed off first.
— Dean F. Wilson, Worldwaker
perhaps, all these years, historians had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral because a spiral was so difficult to describe. was war, then, the big solution after all? war the great aphrodisiac, the great source of world adrenalin, the solvent of ennui, angst, melancholia, accidia, spleen? war itself a massive sexual act. -war, finally, the controller, the trimmer & excisor; the justifier of fertility?" --the Wanting Seed/Burgess
— Tony Burgess
War comes home— invades it, literally— and every day is another combat. Only, there’s nothing available, nothing real to fight. And you never know when the next attack will come, only from whom it will come.
— Cristiane Serruya, Love Painted in Red
War is strange. In the beginning it is about people
—  in the end it is about power. Power couldn’t care less how many die.
When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
Whatever the challenge, never quit, never give up, never surrender.
— Charles M. Grist
War does have a way of interfering with one's most closely held desires.
— Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War
Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;--and yet too much for twenty years.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
A [national] flag has no real significance for peaceful uses.
— H.G. Wells, The World Of William Clissold Vol. 2
It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss.
— Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin, The Walk - Memoir of a Liberian Civil War Survivor, 2016
Will you stay in Germany?''No. Somewhere different.''Like where?''Somewhere there was no war. Ireland maybe.
— Audrey Magee, The Undertaking
Discord on one level is harmony on another
— Alan W. Watts
Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war.
— Sinclair Lewis, Kingsblood Royal
Victory stands on the back of sacrifice.
— Lexa
Anecdotal tales of combat are meaningless to Americans, we absorb tales of violence like a sponge. Mythological violence is second nature to us. The real thing is not. War begins long before battle. It begins when we are boys longing for the initiation rite of the warrior and everything it promises: sexual prowess and sexual license. War lasts long after the last bullet is fired; into old age and death we go carrying a secret knowledge that no one wants to know about. War is the opposite of sexual prowess. War is desire stripped of humanity.
— Alfredo Véa
Victory stands on the back of sacrifice
— Lexa
I knew then the answer to my question; the question I’d asked myself many times during this war, and many more times since it ended. When would I be able to put the war behind me? When would I be able to forget it? And I knew now that the answer was simple.Never. I never would. Some things end. But war never does.
— John Marsden, The Other Side of Dawn
Sometimes war is necessary to teach us the value of peace. Sometimes you need to learn the real value of diplomacy in avoiding war. And I'd rather my students learned those lessons on the playground than on the battlefield.
— Neil Gaiman, InterWorld
The war was all that mattered to Hitler. Yet, cocooned in the strange world of the Wolf's Lair, he was increasingly severed from its realities, both at the front and at home. Detachment ruled out all vestiges of humanity. Even towards those in his own entourage who had been with him for many years, there was nothing resembling real affection, let alone friendship; genuine fondness was reserved only for his young Alsatian. He had described the human being the previous autumn as no more than 'a ridiculous "cosmic bacterium" (eine lächerliche "Weltraumbakterie")'. Human life and suffering was, thus, of no consequence to him. He never visited a field-hospital, nor the homeless after bomb-raids. He saw no massacres, went near no concentration camp, viewed no compound of starving prisoners-of-war. His enemies were in his eyes like vermin to be stamped out. But his profound contempt for human existence extended to his own people. Decisions costing the lives of tens of thousands of his soldiers were made — perhaps it was only thus possible to make them — without consideration for any human plight. As he had told Guderian during the winter crisis, feelings of sympathy and pity for the suffering of his soldiers had to be shut out. For Hitler, the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed were merely an abstraction, the suffering a necessary and justified sacrifice in the 'heroic struggle' for the survival of the people.
— Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis
Most people in our world are just dreaming and having hope for something which will never happen, Maybe you want to know why? Cause they dream about peace so they are trying to do anything like making war, killing people and they have hope to get peace? But they will never get peace by making war, killing lots of people, destroying thair countries and spreading violence and hate among different nations which that is wrong dream and wrong hope cause i believe war was not, is not and will be never the way to get peace. There is only one way to earn peace or having peace and that is by respecting and loving every kinds of human being. Let's start loving and forgiving each other for whatever we did.
— Arash Tabish
The refusal to take part in all war under any conditions is an unworldly view bound to remain a sectarian doctrine. It no more challenges the state's authority than the celibacy of priests challenges the sanctity of marriage.
— John Rawls, A Theory of Justice
I dreamed in night vision; whiteflowers of nocturnalgun fire – day residue shot to hell. If I held my dreamsto a windowsill,sun would sievethrough my screams.
— Jalina Mhyana, The Trauma Scope: Poems of Heartache & Optical Illusion
Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book-shops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armored cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning and never being defeated.
— Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night
War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will com and I won't even see it. ~Darrow
— Pierce Brown, Golden Son
Yet I now ask of you—are you marauders or are you servants? Do you give power to others, or do you hoard it? Do you fight not to have something, but rather fight so that others might one day have something? Is your blade a part of your soul, or is it a burden, a tool, to be used with care? Are you soldiers, my children, or are you savages?
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.
— Laini Taylor, Blackbringer
I have taken many lives in my life. Many children, perhaps husbands, wives, parents. Perhaps it is only just that this same violation was inflicted upon me. Perhaps it is just that one who lives a life of war becomes a refugee from it.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
We don't all make it out the other side, not all of us. But somewhere, there's the click of a pen, a proud signature, a father's hand on a young man's shoulder, and we reload. That's the sound of our collective gun cocking, the click of a pen. That's us racking another round in the chamber. Fire that boy out, hope you hit something. If he gets three before he goes home in his own bag, then the numbers look good. That father gets his medal. No one else to wear it.
— Hugh Howey, Beacon 23
The rain still drummed on the roof, like fine needles striking the shingles. The family sat silently around the table, each one wrapped in their own thoughts.It was Matthew’s voice that broke the silence, asking, “And what happened after that?”“After that,” said Paul, “came Gettysburg.
— Elisabeth Grace Foley, War Memorial
Through all of those different wars, we came to understand each other. The Mason’s fellas just wanted to chill in their area and be left alone. The Border Boys basically wanted the same thing. Stinky and Robert just wanted to be able to sell their drugs and make their money. But us, we were on a mission to take over the whole town. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members
— Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
Jimi on the box, thirty stories up, everything immediate, yet distanced. Jimi's chords locked in aerial dogfights, gliding, riding, sliding, hiding, belligerent bursts, hallucinogenic, a head-warping face-wiping mind melt, chords live dive bombers screaming in for the kill, scintillating, serrated chords shot through with arc-light shrieks of staccato mayhem, as immediate and horrific as the firefight racketing away this very second below our red and puffy eyes; chords that hang in the air like the retinal reflection of an eerie afterburn, the stars displaced and the smell of a world that burned. Overhead, night birds flying, Huey, Apache, Chinook, whooshing with murderous potential. And over everything - every apocalyptic bang, boom, and rattle - Jimi, bleating like Braxton and bonding with the bombast.
— Roger Steffens
Being peaceful may not be exciting like being at war, but it is the bliss and joy of life that you really enjoy.
— Debasish Mridha
WILL WORK FOR FOOD © 2013 Lyrics & Music by Michele JennaeThere he was with a cardboard sign, Will Work For Food Saw him on the roadside, As I took my kids to schoolI really didn’t have time to stop, Already running late Found myself pulling over, Into the hands of fate The look in his eyes was empty, But he held out his hand I knew my kids were watching, As I gave him all I had My heart in my throat I had to ask, “What brought you here?” He looked up and straight into my eyes, I wanted to disappear. CHORUS He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DOv. 2 He put the money in his pocket, Then he took me by the hand Thank you dear for stopping by, I am sure that you have plans He nodded toward my children, Watching from afar It’s time they were off to school, You should get in the car My eyes welled up and tears fell down, I couldn’t say a word Here this man with nothing to his name, Showing me his concern I knew then that the lesson, That today must be taught Wouldn’t come from textbooks, And it could not be bought CHORUS He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DOv. 3 I told him then that I had a job, That I could give him work And in return he’d have a meal, And something to quench his thirst He looked at me and shrugged a bit, And followed me to the car We went right over to a little café, Just up the road not too far After I ordered our food he looked at me, And asked about the kids “Shouldn’t these tykes be in school, And about that job you said.” “Your job,” I said, “is to school my girls, In the ways of the world Explain to them your service, And how your life unfurled.”He said… Do you think I really saw myself, Standing in this light Forgotten by society, After fighting for your rights WILL WORK FOR FOOD, WILL DIE FOR YOU I AM JUST A FORGOTTEN SOLDIER, I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DOv. 4He wasn’t sure quite what to do, As he ate his food And began to tell us all about his life… the bad… the good. He wiped his own tears from his eyes, His story all but done My girls and I all choked up, Hugged him one by one Understanding his sacrifice, But not his current plight We resolved then and there that day, That for him, we would fight. We offered him our friendship, And anything else we had He wasn’t sure how to accept it, But we made him understandLAST CHORUS That we had not really seen before, Him standing in the light No longer forgotten by us, We are now fighting for his rights He had… WORKED FOR FOOD HE HAD ALL BUT DIED FOR ME AND YOU NOT FORGOTTEN ANYMORE BUT STILL A SOLDIER IN TRUST
— Michele Jennae
Who desired the Great War? No nation benefitted from it. The war brought about the destruction of the Prussian Empire, stripped the British Empire of its ability to hold its colonies, slaughtered the French and starved Germany, inspired a revolution in Russia, and prepared the ground for a more terrible slaughter to come. The great powers didn’t want a war and they certainly didn’t need one. But their people wanted a war. To the surprise of the rulers across the Allies and the Central Powers, the idea of war was seized by the people of every nation.
— Matthew De Abaitua, If Then
Until we face the war within ourselves, the world will never change.
— Dana Gore
I just want to keep you safe.I smile. Americans can be so naive.
— Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale
It's worse for you. You want the guilt to absolve you. Just like you want your wife and child to absolve you. Once absolved, you can kill or take soup.
— Audrey Magee, The Undertaking
Impending war was evidenced by the faraway expression in the older villagers' eyes, the shadows on their faces, not of fear but of sorrow. Because they knew; they had lived through the last war and they remembered the generation of young men who had marched off so willingly and never come back. Those too, like Daddy, who had made it home, but left in France a part of themselves that they could never recover. Who surrendered to moments, periodically, in which their eyes filmed and their lips whitened, and their minds gave over to sights and sounds they wouldn't share but couldn't shake.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
Today the world seems to be like a stagnated place, because the majority of humanity are not eager to see others rise.
— Auliq-Ice
This isn't just a war over land, it's a war about God. And Alfred...is Christ's servant...
— Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman
No, blowing up cities doesn't work, not in the long term. You've got to find something that the people in charge aren't willing to give up. A price they aren't willing to pay.Which leads us to Talis's first rule for stopping wars: make it personal.
— Erin Bow, The Scorpion Rules
I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I’ve done it so many times. First, there’s a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.
— Sebastian Junger, Tribe
I've had people tell me to get over it. I politely tell them, 'How about if I chop off your finger and see if it grows back?
— Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.
— Bernard Cornwell, The Pale Horseman
What about our human rights,' demanded Carl, who'd gathered a small deputation of kids within minutes. 'There is a WAR ON,' said Crewman Devlin, shortly. I wondered if this meant grown-ups actually listen to you when there wasn't a war on, because somehow I was sceptical.
— Sophia McDougall, Mars Evacuees
Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitude. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
Another atrocity of summer is soccer. When the Euro Cup is on, it brings out the worst in people. It turns them into ravaging beasts who complain when a team they like, which they have done nothing to deserve, slips from grace and loses the match.An old man sitting beside me at the cafe was watching the men watch the soccer rather than watch the soccer himself. He found their reactions more entertaining than the game."All this stuff and nonsense over men kicking a ball," he groused. "And they don't do any of the work themselves."I told him, "We should just have wars. Then we would not need sports."He laughed and quite agreed with me.
— Michelle Franklin
War is the echo that never dies. No society strives for war, they are always tricked into it.
— R.A.Delmonico
This is a picture of him from 1919, just after the war, looking like he slept in that uniform all the way from France. He still had that face, but he wasn't the same. I know there's men who came back changed: the Paterson boy up in Brownville hung himself that summer. Nobody talked about it much, and I suppose that was for the best. But Jack wasn't like that; it hadn't been a terrible thing for him, I don't think. Or if it had been, then it was one of those terrible things you get through and it sets you free.
— David F. Porteous, The Death of Jack Nylund
But still. It has to end sometime. Wars always do. Everything has to end,' said Josephine, eating another ginger biscuit and getting unexpectedly philosophical. 'Yeah. Things like human civilisation,' I said.
— Sophia McDougall, Mars Evacuees
You always hear all these statements like "Freedom isn't free." You hear the President talking about all these people making sacrifices. But you never really know until you carry one of them in a casket. When you feel their bodyweight. When you feel them. That's when you know. That's when you understand.
— Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
Space and time blurred and the void filled with explosions and shards and narrow misses and voices in the Force: his pilots, laughing and swearing and howling to their deaths. He laughed and swore and howled along with them, the silence unbearable.Kill, kill, and kill again, slaughter the starfighters, slaughter the Tuskens, every loss is the same loss, every pain springs from one source. Save Kothlis, save Coruscant, save Padmé. Save them all.
— Karen Miller, Stealth
It's something that this country hasn't had to deal with. But there's going to be a whole new generation that doesn't know their father. It's almost selfish of us to die. They train us as warriors. But they don't teach us how to take the pain away.
— Jim Sheeler
You know, sometimes I wish they would do this for us when we come home alive.
— Jim Sheeler
I knew that these people on their way to work or home or dinner had no idea what it was they were supporting. They did not have a clue as to what war was like. What it made people see, and what it made them do to each other. I felt as though I didn't deserve their support, or anyone's, for what I had done. No one should ever support the activities in which I had participated. No one should ever support the people who do such things. (...) They were uninformed but good people. The kind whose respect we would welcome if it was based upon something true. It was when we were around them that we had to hide the actual truth most consciously. It wasn't enough to not mention the war or being a veteran, because they'd bring it up. The civilians we were most anxious around, and therefore tended the most to avoid, were exactly those good citizens who thought they were helping us.
— Jessica Goodell, Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq
The only problem they had ... was in drawing the fine differences between war-mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own; justifiable loss-mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains; and criminal negligence-mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit.
— Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon
Just when you think this war has taken everything you loved, you meet someone and realize that somehow you still have more to give.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
If you think the world is full of darkness, let us see your light. If you think the world is full of wickedness, let us see your goodness. If you think people are acting wrongly, let us see your right action. If you think people don't know, let us see what you know. If you think the world is full of uncaring people let us see how you care about people. If you think life is not being fair to you, let us see how you can be fair to life. If you think people are proud, let us see your humility. We can easily find fault and we can easily see what is wrong but a positive attitude backed by a right action in a true direction is all we need to survive in peace and harmony in the arena of life
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
You are wrong,” says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. “Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier’s life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
Obviously it was happenstance, but it did change my opinion of human nature. I now saw war as a constant, akin to wildfires. They break out unless you work actively to prevent them. It’s an atavistic thing, buried deep in our DNA.
— Richard Engel, And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East
You think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold
They say in death our war is over. I don't believe that.
— Paul Allor, TET
Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years.""I hope that's not true", I said.
— Sara Nović, Girl at War
Humans and their wars. You call me monster, , but look what you've gone and done to one another! Good riddance to you now and, if I'm lucky, forever. Have your war. I'll have my radish stew.
— Aaron Burdett
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
— T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
The car rolled slowly along the deserted corniche, headlights cleaving its way through Beirut by night. In gentle swerves to avoid potholes, the Mercedes waltzed along a straight road in a dance of death. Sick palm trees and parched grass divided the tarred road of civilization. The sea alone was testimony to God’s beautiful creation. But in its belly, corpses, limbs, garbage, and ordnance mingled with a sea life on the verge of extinction.
— Dana K. Haffar, Beirut in Shades of Grey
Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die.
— Joan Wehlen Morrison, Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
We had won the war, but when the insurgency reared its ugly head, we lost everything we had gained.
— Kenneth Eade, Beyond All Recognition
That is the way a white man remembers a battle. So many soldiers here, so many there. Such a captain here. Such a lieutenant there. This colonel in one place. That major in another. The horses precisely here, the cannon exactly there. But not an Indian. An Indian remembers where his mother fell bayoneted, or his little brother had his skull smashed, or his big sister cried for mercy and was shot in the mouth.
— Will Henry
I was appraising . . . not eye fooking.
— Paul Allor, TET
War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.
— Stephen Ambrose
They have forgotten that war is momentum.War is natural. And war makes one strong.
— Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades
hit with your fist, not with your finger spread
— Prasetya Ramadhan
Every time someone tries to prevent a war from beginning...people get killed.
— Captain America - The Avengers...The Age of Ultron
Lord Tierney was furious. But when he saw how his sister had suffered, his anger shifted instead toward Rome. “If it weren’t for this new menace on the horizon,” he thundered, “I’d declare war on those haughty deceivers this instant!”Marcus stepped forward. “Kyrie, I don’t think—"“Then don’t!
— Jennifer McKeithen, Atlantis On the Shores of Forever
God be with you.''Thanks, but I think, in battle, I prefer Satan’s company.
— Robert Thier, The Robber Knight's Love
Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
— Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Barrayar is bred in my bones. I cannot shake it, no matter how far I travel. This struggle, God knows, has no honor in it. But exile, for no other motive than ease—that would be to give up all hope of honor. The last defeat, with no seed of future victory in it.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour
What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans.
— Chris Hedges
The Scholomance was a piece of Shadowhunter history come to life. A cold castle of towers and corridors carved into the side of a mountain in the Carpathians, it had existed for centuries as a place where the most elite of Shadowhunters were trained to deal with the double menaces of demons and Downworlders. It had been closed when the first Accords were signed: a show of faith that Downworlders and Shadowhunters were no longer at war.
— Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight
We didn’t believe in tomorrow. We we couldn’t forget what had happened yesterday.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
The future was chaos, war and blood and thirst, ending with everyone's bones bleached white in the desert. The sand would bury their buildings and bodies, and eventually it would be impossible to tell that anyone had lived in the desert at all.
— Becky Allen, Bound by Blood and Sand
I am asked if I think the war was a just war ... how can I answer? I was a boy born and raised in beautiful Leningrad, a boy who loved his parents and went obediently to school. A boy who was yanked out of that life and dumped in a strange land where life followed different rules.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
The photos I took in Afghanistan are lying in front of me. I peer into the faces of those who were with me there and who are so far away from me now, into the faces of those who were dying right next to me and those who were hiding behind my back. I can make these photos larger or smaller, darker or lighter. But what I can't do is bring back those who are gone forever.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
When I was drafted into the army in April 1984, I was a nineteen-year-old boy. The club where they took us was a distribution centre. Officers came there from various military units and picked out the soldiers they wanted. My fate was decided in one minute. A young officer came up to me and asked, “Do you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?” Of course I agreed. Two hours later I was on a plane to Uzbekistan (a Soviet republic in Central Asia), where our training base was located.During the flight, I learned most of the soldiers from this base were sent to Afghanistan. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t surprised. At that point I didn’t care anymore because I understood that it is impossible to change anything. ‘To serve in the Soviet army is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens” – as it’s written in our Constitution. And no one gives a damn whether you want to fulfil this “honourable duty” or not. But then I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. Up until 1985, in the press and on television, they told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals. And only a few knew that more and more cemeteries were being filled with the graves of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys. Without the dates of their death, without inscriptions. Only their names on black stone …At the base we were trained and taught to shoot. We were told that we were being sent to Afghanistan not to plant trees. And as to building schools, we simply wouldn’t have the time …Three and a half months later, my plane was landing in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan … We were taken to a club on base. A few minutes later, officers started to come by and choose soldiers. Suddenly, an officer with a smiling face and sad eyes burst in noisily. He looked us over with an appraising glance and pointed his finger at me: “Ah ha! I see a minesweeper!” That’s how I became a minesweeper. Ten days later, I went on my first combat mission.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
When you live next to death ... you don't think about it anymore, you just try to encounter it as seldom as possible.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
In forty minutes, people will be shooting at these 19 year old boys. And they will shoot back, and they will kill. That is the law of war: if you don’t kill first, they’ll kill you. We didn’t invent this law.But having landed in a war, we have to live by its rules. And the quicker you learn the rules, the longer you have to live by them. You don’t think about whether you are defending someone’s revolution or defending the ‘southern borders of the motherland’. You simply shoot at those who are shooting at you and at your friend behind you – you shoot at the guys whose mines blew away your friend yesterday.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
It was at that point that I started probing them about what they wanted from America. Here's what they told me: "We want our kids to go out and play. We want them to go out and play and not feel like they're going to get hurt. I want my kid to not be on the computer all day long. I want him to go outside and play. I want him to not be on computer games. I want my kids to go to school. I want my wife to be happy. I want..." "That's what we cant back home," I said. "Why would it be so different?" he said. Why would you think that what I want in my quality of life is so vastly different from yours?
— David Chrisinger, See Me for Who I Am: Student Veterans' Stories of War and Coming Home
By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
If the international community is not ready to defend the principles which it itself has proclaimed as its foundations, let it say so openly, both to the people of Bosnia and to the people of the world. Let it proclaim a new code of behavior in which force will be the first and the last argument.
— Alija Izetbegović
He was holding his right leg, but the blood soaked through his fingers and flowed over his hand onto his sleeve. Intuition had served me again this time: my kick had knocked his automatic out of his grasp a fraction of a second before he could press the trigger. The second kick was to his face. It sent him flying about six feet. I set my sights on his head, but something stopped me, one of our guys let out a yelp behind me. Another bullet whistled by right next to me. Apparently, this Mujahadeen was not the only one here. Again, I aimed at his head, but something again stopped me. I saw how his hands were trembling. I noticed the horror in his eyes. 'He is only a boy!' I thought and pressed the trigger.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan I’d been on combat missions. 217 days. And I’m still paying the price for every one of those days.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
We stayed here for only a few hours. We rested and went on. But the camera snatched this fraction of a second from the eternal flow of time and froze it forever. At this moment we didn’t know that in a few hours we would fall into an ambush. At this moment, while we were filling our canteens from the stream, we didn’t yet know that we would stay in the mountains for three days without a drop of water. We didn’t yet know anything …
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
I’m not afraid of anything and I will not fight.
— Matthew De Abaitua
There's nothing I can do to erase the shadow of misery and despair from the eyes looking back at me from the photos [that I took in Afghanistan].
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that gets the prizes. But your husband's voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.
— Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
The spectacle takes us away from our routines. For at least a time, we feel part of something big, colorful, exciting. It is perhaps understandable that civilians are often more enthusiastic during wartime than soldiers who have experienced battle. The soldiers know that war is often boring and dirty as well as terrifying and colorful. Even so, after some years, an old soldier like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., could brush aside his earlier description of the pain, boredom, and death of war and declare that “its message was divine.” The stench disappears, but the spectacle remains in memory’s eye.
— Nel Noddings, Peace Education: How We Come to Love and Hate War
When I came home, I was asked to put my pictures in a photo exhibit at the Cinematography College ... my pictures won first prize. I began to ask myself what I was doing, and why. A few months after the exhibit, I dropped out of college, left my wife and began to write this book.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
You will never be able to push a button and kill people. You will not avoid the horrors. War must be so terrible that people will do almost anything to avoid it. It must be the last resort and in this case, it is, but that decision can only be made by the ones with the most to lose, not someone sitting safely in an underground facility, watching it on the monitors."Free Trader 4 - Battle for the Amazon, by Craig Martelle
— Craig Martelle
It's the young who will lead us to the future."Free Trader 4 - Battle for the Amazon
— Craig Martelle
[On one of his comrades depicted in the book:]"Sasha was my friend … Like me, he was 19. But he didn't come home. He was killed 12 hours after this photo was taken.
— Vladislav Tamarov, Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story
I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man's soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man's life...
— Bernard Cornwell, The Last Kingdom
The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea