c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
1. Most wars are asymmetrical or irregular.2. In these wars, the guerrillas/irregulars/insurgents do not aim for military victory.3. You can not defeat these groups by killing lots of their members. In fact, they want you to do that.4. High-tech weaponry is mostly useless in these wars.5. “Hearts and minds,” meaning propaganda and morale, are more important than military superiority.6. Most people are not rational; they are tribal: “My gang yeah, your gang boo!” It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.
— Gary Brecher, The War Nerd
War cannot eliminate differing ideas and viewpoints, and partisans of the defeated side do not disappear. Though subjugated, they become a sizable political constituency in the postwar period. A dictator may be able to repress them, and in democracies a numerical majority may outvote them, but neither can change their thoughts. Since civil wars are, by nature, deep and fundamental conflicts, the competition between the views that led to war is likely to resurface. The defeated side may be chastened or subdued, but its values and ways of seeing the world reappear, in some form, in politics [107].
— Paul D. Escott, Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States
In today's world hunger for sanity seems to be more intense than our hunger for food.
— Munia Khan
Maybe people had no choice but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice would have made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
The longer he remained on this earth, the more he was sure that mankind had no clue about God or heaven. Not when they used him as an excuse to kill, to punish, to discriminate.
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
We are at war. War has a way of stripping us of perspective. War is about life and death, and it paints everything in shades of now or never.
— Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash
The gods demand entertainment. They demand trial and contest. We could not be allowed to defeat our own daemons, for that would be boring, and boredom is the only thing the eternals fear. We are being lined up, one by one, to tear at each other's throats. I do not think they wish to see a victor. I think they wish us to fight forever, locked in madness until the universe's end
— Chris Wraight
They don't want a princess. They want a war queen.
— J.M. Robison, The War Queen
Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?
— Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
The old refrain is that there are no atheists in foxholes. That's nonsense. They are there by the millions. There is little in combat that will lead one to look upon the Creator with favor. What can't be there, instead, is the individualist, the selfish, the self-consumed, the self-centered, the aloof loner. Such a man cannot long survive. The terror of combat cannot be described by fear of death. There are worse things. The world can suddenly become a very cold place...He needs warmth, a fire, to survive: His discipline, his training, his duty, honor and country, his family, and ultimately the very oak of his manhood are thrown into the blaze, but they are not enough to save him. At the end, he needs the warmth of his comrades. Otherwise, all he will have with which to face the cold dark will be his own spent soul.
— Frank Boccia, The Crouching Beast: A United States Army Lieutenant's Account of the Battle for Hamburger Hill, May 1969
I will lament your departure. I will hide my shame for having erred on some obscure point, for thinking that the justice of war is the same of peacetime.
— Paulo Coelho, The Spy
You must become your enemy to truly understand him.
— Felix O. Hartmann, Dark Age
On some issues, it will be an apparent insult to expect one not to be emotional about it, not to be prejudiced or side one's kit and kin.On issues as deep and as touchy as the Nigerian civil war and its consequences to the easterners, till this present day, to ask me not to cry, not to mourn, not to discuss it, is reduce me to a robot and ask of me a miracle, I am no TB Joshua.I may not discuss it often, but in truth, it was a regrettable and sorrowful experience, for any people at all!
— Magnus Nwagu Amudi
If you are not affected, if you are not hurt by what we do, then you will not do anything to stop it. The war will simply continue.
— Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
With all the god-awful suffering in this war, I suppose somebody ought to be enjoying it.
— Henry V. O'Neil, CHOP Line
If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then that future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did.
— Electronic Arts
The men history declares heroes are merely heroes because they failed to survive their benevolent acts.
— Felix O. Hartmann, Dark Age
I know who you are,” he says.Something about his tone causes my heart of smoke to flicker in response, and I throw my guard up. “Oh? And who, O boy of Parthenia, am I?”He nods to himself, his eyes alight. “You’re her. You’re that jinni. Oh, gods. Oh, great bleeding gods! You’re the one who started the war!”“Excuse me?”“You’re the jinni who betrayed that famous queen—what was her name? Roshana? She was trying to bring peace between the jinn and the humans, but you turned on her and started the Five Hundred Wars.”I turn cold. I want him to stop, but he doesn’t.“I’ve heard the stories,” he says. “I’ve heard the songs. They call you the Fair Betrayer, who enchanted humans with your . . .” He pauses to swallow. “Your beauty. You promised them everything, and then you ruined them.
— Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish
Think back over the years, when each kingdom had its own king. They fought each other, not only between kingdoms, but within kingdoms. They had no unity, no peace! Every kingdom wanted something another kingdom had, and rather than share, they fought! There was greed! There was strife! There was war and there was death! That, my hypocritical and judgmental friend, constitutes the highest form of slavery! Ryadok
— Sandra Kopp, Warrior Queen of Ha-Ran-Fel
Because I am an officer and a gentleman they have given me my notebooks, pen, ink and paper. So I write and wait. I am committed to no cause, I love no living person. The fact that I have no future except what you can count in hours doesn't seem to disturb me unduly. After all, the future whether here or there is equally unknown. So for the waiting days I have only the past to play about with. I can juggle with a series of possibly inaccurate memories, my own interpretation, for what is worth, of events. There is no place for speculation or hope, or even dreams. Strangely enough I think I like it like that.
— Jennifer Johnston, How Many Miles To Babylon?
Brianna’s looking for Drake,” Edilio said, thinking out loud.“You sent her out against Drake?” Albert demanded.“Sent her? Who sends Brianna out to get into a fight? She goes on her own. Anyway, it’s not like you’ve left us with anyone else.”Albert had the decency not to say anything to that.“You know, you guys put me in charge. I didn’t ask to be in charge. I didn’t want to be in charge. Sam was in charge and all you guys ever did was give him grief,” Edilio said. “You two, especially.” He pointed at Albert and Astrid. “So, okay, Astrid takes over. And then Astrid finds out it’s not so much fun being in charge. So it’s like, okay, let’s get the dumb wetback to do the job.”“No one ever—,” Astrid protested.“And me, like a fool, I’m thinking, okay, that must mean people trust me. They asked me to be in charge, be the mayor. Come to find out, I’m not making decisions; Albert’s making decisions. Albert’s deciding we need to find more water and sending our two best fighters off into the countryside. Now I’m supposed to fix everything? It’s like you go, ‘Fight a war,’ but you sent my army off on a wild goose chase.
— Michael  Grant, Plague
It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!
— Widad Akreyi
Let’s stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.
— Widad Akreyi
Your people sell the weapons. My people use them.
— Henry V. O'Neil, CHOP Line
He relaxed into the dirt, it was all right, he was infantry and the dirt was home. He felt warm liquid all over his left thigh and wondered if he’d peed himself, it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, the stars were out in the blackness overhead and that was where he was going.
— Henry V. O'Neil, CHOP Line
Cripes, just listen to that desperation mixed with a wild joie de vivre. That doesn't come out of nothing. They'll be able to hear that a massive eruption once rocked the world and scattered pain and passion in it's wake.
— Cat Winters, The Uninvited
Cigarettes are called coffin nails for a reason, Billy Boy," I remembered telling him. "Be careful with those things. You're risking your life.
— Cat Winters, The Uninvited
A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike
We will continue to march, even if everything shatters, because today Germany hears us, and tomorrow, the whole world. And because of the Great War, the world lies in ruins, but devil may care, we build it up again.
— Rhidian Brook, The Aftermath
Love conquers all. Let Love then smile at our defeat.
— Virgil, The Eclogues
Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood.The burning question is, How?
— Lawrence Anthony, Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.
— Morley Safer
I crawled in a spirit-haunted placeMade wild by souls that moan and mourn;And Death leered by with mangled face -Ah God! I prayed, I prayed for dawn.
— Arthur Newberry 1893- Choyce, Memory Poems of War and Love
Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else freedom.
— Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman
You cannot win the war. You will seem to win but it will be an illusion. You will win the battles, kill billions, rape Worlds, take slaves, and destroy ships and weapons. But after that you will be forced to hold the subjection. Your numbers will not be expendable. You will be spread thin, exposed to other cultures that will influence you, change you. You will lose skirmishes, and in the end you will be forced back. Then will come a loss of old ethics, corruption and opportunism will replace your honor and you will know unspeakable shame and dishonor... your culture will soon be weltering back into a barbarism and disorganization which in its corruption and despair will be nothing like the proud tribal primitive life of its first barbarism. You will be aware of the difference and unable to return.
— Charles V. de Vet, Second Game
Against the claims of a violent "human nature" there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel. When citizens have an opportunity to learn of vicious acts committed by their own governments, they react with indignation and protest.So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.
— Howard Zinn, The Bomb
When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word "terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word "terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
— Howard Zinn, The Bomb
It's the time to run away an' hide under the bed, an' hope the world's still in one piece when you come out again.
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 9: The Big Ride
War soaks into your bones, drills down into the marrow like a parasite. It blots your life like ink spilled on snow white paper, and it has its perils even long after you've given it up.
— Christopher  Johnson
What remains to us here, behind the Yser, is not much more than a strip of land almost impossible to defend; a few rain-soaked trenches around razed villages; roads blown to smithereens, unusable by any vehicle; a creaky old horse cart we haul around ourselves, loaded with crates of damp ammunition that are constantly on the verge of sliding into a canal, forcing us to slog like madmen for every ten yards of progress as we stifle our warning cries; the snarling officers in the larger dug-outs, walled off with boards, where the privates have to bail water every day and brush the perpetual muck off their superiors’ boots; the endless crouching as we walk the trenches, grimy and smelly; our louse-ridden uniforms; our arseholes burning with irritation because we have no clean water for washing them after our regular attacks of diarrhoea; our stomach cramps as we crawl over heavy clods of earth like trolls in some gruesome fairy tale; the evening sun slanting down over the barren expanse; infected fingers torn by barbed wire; the startling memory of another, improbable life, when a thrush bursts into song in a mulberry bush or a spring breeze carries the smell of grassy fields from far behind the front line, and we throw ourselves flat on our bellies again as howitzers open fire out of nowhere, the crusts of bread in our hands falling into the sludge at the boot-mashed bottom of the stinking trench.
— Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine
Well, I once recall an old master sergeant once telling me that NCOs look after the men so that officers can figure out how to get them killed. That's the difference between maintenance and command.
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 9: The Big Ride
After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground.
— Garth Ennis, The Boys, Volume 9: The Big Ride
...Chief without soldiers is just a very lonely man in a big bloody field
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
It has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
I don't believe that humans can be reduced to homo economicus, but as a group, government officials are remarkably sensitive to financial, political, and reputational costs. Thus, when new technologies appear to reduce the costs of using lethal force, their threshold for deciding to use lethal force correspondingly drops. If killing a suspected terrorist in Yemen or Somalia or Libya will endanger expensive manned aircraft, the lives of U.S. troops, and/or the lives of many innocent civilians, officials will reserve such killings for situations of extreme urgency and gravity (stopping another 9/11, getting Osama bin Laden). But if all that appears to be at risk is a an easily replaceable drone, officials will be tempted to use lethal force more and more casually.
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
Love and war. Same coin. Different sides. I'm too wrinkled for either.""Maybe war will breathe some life into your old bones.""Well, I tried love last month." He leans close. "Didn't work like it used to.""Too honest, Lorn." I can't help but laugh.
— Pierce Brown, Golden Son
We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some were baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some were baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.
— Nicholas Emmett
During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.
— Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
—so as the great Achilles rampaged on, his sharp-hoofed stallions trampled shields and corpses, axle under his chariot splashed with blood, blood on the handrails sweeping round the car, sprays of blood shooting up from the stallions' hoofs and churning, whirling rims—and the son of Peleus charioteering on to seize his glory, bloody filth splattering both strong arms, Achilles' invincible arms—
— Homer, The Iliad
When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.
— Dick Pirozzolo, Escape from Saigon
When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 a.m. on November 11th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other's faces did not cry jubilantly: " We've won the war! " They only said: " The War is over.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
… as General Berringer would readily admit, “If you’re in a fair fight, I’ve done something wrong.
— T. Mountebank
She knew now that no one could be neutral - not anymore - and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie's life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need.
— Kristin Hannah
I never thought that it would look like this. The October of 2009 was a difficult period, and not just because of the bad weather. Attacks intensified against military units and every patrol was highly dangerous. A lot of time has passed since the first time I was fired on in the open. Suddenly, bullets fly right over my head… fraction of a second separates me from tensing my muscles and starting to shoot from a gun turret placed on top our Humvee. I know that I was lucky as hell, but as you know, normally none of us need to talk about it." (excerpt of the book Wild Heads of War)
— Artur Fidler
Fear no one nor kneel before themFor many seek to be your god and masterAnd you sacrificial lamb in their fevered plansAnd insane ambitionsKhoiSan Book of Wisdom
— rassool jibraeel snyman
Make not the scars of yesterdayMake you bitter todayYesterday has passedAnd like water in a river once passed Can never be returnedThe KhoiSan Book of Wisdom
— rassool jibraeel snyman
I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets or appropriations bills, not to mention deal with tough challenges like the budget deficit, Social Security, and entitlement reforms. So many times I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?
— Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War
Every sword that was dripping the blood became a pen. Every word that was written in it became a poetry.
— Akshay Vasu
European historians have often, though not unanimously, assumed that European modern warfare was the one true path, a system that developed logically and inevitably from the nature of the advancing technology of guns. Since Europeans by their own definition were the most rational and logical of people, their mode of warfare was also the most rational and logical. Those who did not adopt it after seeing it were being deliberately irrational, or lacked the ability to advance their polity to the point where it could follow it.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
I was done with hesitation. It wasn't just that we'd run out of options, or that so much was riding on the firebird's power. I'd simply grown ruthless enough or selfish enough to take another creature's life. But I missed the girl who had shown the stag mercy, who had been strong enough to turn away from the lure of power, who had believed in something more. Another casualty of this war.
— Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
Presumably, the bells of the Church of the Ascension had been reclaimed by the Bolsheviks for the manufacture of artillery, thus returning them to the realm from whence they came. Though for all the Count knew, the cannons that had been salvaged from Napoleon's retreat to make the Ascension's bells had been forged by the French from the bells at La Rochelle; which in turn had been forged from British blunderbusses seized in the Thirty Years War. From bells to cannons and back again, from now until the end of time.
— Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Shame on the misguided, the blinded, the distracted and the divided. Shame. You have allowed deceptive men to corrupt and desensitize your hearts and minds to unethically fuel their greed.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
If we are to survive, I must start and end my war this same day.
— Heather Day Gilbert, Forest Child
We call this a “bow”, Cap’n, and the thing that’s sticking out of that fellow’s head over on the other side of the trench is called an “arrow”. If you put them together just right, they’ll do all sorts of nice things to people who aren’t nice.
— David Eddings, The Treasured One
The Government finally decidedTo wage the war all-out. Defeat is Un-American. And they took to the air,Their women beside themin bouffant hairdosputting nail-polish on thegunship cannon-buttons.And they never came downfor they found,the groundis Pro-Communist. And dirty.And the insects side with the Viet Cong.
— Gary Snyder, Turtle Island
It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties."-- Nenya, The Water Warrior
— Mili Fay, Warriors of Virtue Epic YA Fantasy Series Episode 1: Text Edition
With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national ‘pretexts,’ led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
The world after a war is a good world, I told myself. A happy world. A secure world. In this world, I might do anything.
— Jennifer Niven, American Blonde
History is littered with the wars everybody knew could never happen.
— Enoch Powell
Soldiers of capitalism are the fathers of dissent.
— kevin mcpherson eckhoff
When two warring people face each other, the war of words jumps beyond the subject. The subject remains no more central to the arguments.
— Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Why don't we like them?" Katalin asked. "Because they don't treat us right." After Zoltán said it, he marveled at the realization that in trying to clarify years of abuses and lists of grievances, that in trying to make oppression understandable for a child, he had reduced the horror of Soviet domination to one simple, honest statement of fact: The Russians didn't treat the Hungarians right.
— Doris Mortman, The Wild Rose
Where there is war, we know peace has failed, and when peace has failed, we know many will die. And when many will die, we fear the worst, that the whole world will rise up to end the fighting, and if that happens many many more will die. War is an unending process, that only results in death of good men an women, who otherwise, could have done done much more in their life, war is a sad thing, but at the same time it is a good thing. We hunt animals to keep them from overrunning us, well war keeps us from overpopulating the earth and running out of resources, and war makes science invent new things sooner than they would have been if there had been no war. So while war is a horrible thing, it is also a blessing in disguise.
— Satuin Segi
To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Where once we fought for land and God, we now fought to avenge fallen comrades, themselves slaughtered in vengeance. Where could it end? Babes growing to men knowing only days of war.
— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
Where would the world be if we took every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best- in a way that cost them nothing.
— Erich Maria Remarque
A young body, a young heart, and endless courage. That last part is the most important. Don’t let anyone tell you any differently. Why do you think we used to send so many kids your age off to war?
— Karina Halle, Veiled
It was a war, and in a war there are always casualties. Never winners, but always plenty of casualties.
— Mili Fay, Warriors of Virtue Epic YA Fantasy Series Episode 1: Text Edition
I am a Warrior of Virtue, Nenya, the Water Warrior. Ardan is safe at last. That is all that matters. That is all that will ever matter...
— Mili Fay, Warriors of Virtue Epic YA Fantasy Series Episode 1: Text Edition
I had him in my cab once.Who? Neville askedRupert Brooke. He was good, him. "There's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England".That would be the bit with my nose under it; just fucking drive, will you?
— Pat Barker, Toby's Room
But war had a taming effect
— Nadia Hashimi, When the Moon is Low
In a war the most dangerous thing is to understand the enemy. To understand is to forgive.
— Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch
On August 7, 2013, on the evening of the fifth anniversary of the war, Georgian President Mikheil Saakasvili, in a prerecorded interview on Georgia’s Rustavi-2 TV, told that he had met Putin in Moscow in February 2008 at an informal summit of the CIS. During the summit he told Putin that he was ready to say no to NATO in exchange for Russian help with the reintegration of the two breakaway territories. Saakashvili claimed “that ‘Putin did not even think for a minute” about his proposal. “[Putin] smiled and said, ‘We do not exchange your territories for your geopolitical orientation... And it meant ‘we will chop off your territories anyway.’”Saakashvili asked him to talk about the growing tensions along the borders with South Ossetia, saying, “It could not be worse than now.” “That’s when he [Putin] looked at me and said: ‘And here you are very wrong. You will see that very soon it will be much, much, much worse.’” [234]
— Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
On September 11, 2008, during a meeting of the Valdai Club with Vladimir Putin in Sochi, Carrère d’Encausse asked Putin if he would respond positively to Kokoity’s demand for integration of South Ossetia into the Russian Federation. She wrote: “Vladimir Putin answered with the greatest firmness that such a hypothesis was excluded. He explained that if Russia in this specific case was unable to ignore the will of the Ossetian people to be independent, it was firm regarding the principles of respecting the inviolability of existing frontiers. This principle, according to him, applied without exception to the Russian Federation which could not, therefore, welcome into its midst a nation or territory that so desired.”Putin’s double-talk (he is speaking about the “inviolability of existing frontiers” just after having changed the frontiers of Georgia by brutal force) brings her to the — naive — conclusion that “the blunt refusal that was opposed to the Ossetian demand for integration into Russia makes the Russian position clear: the August intervention in Georgia... could lead to a settlement of a conflict between Georgia and its separatist minorities, [but] in no case to a dossier that was of interest to Russia.” [237]
— Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
Well, when you're fourteen years old, you can't afford to mix in a rock fight with your five-year-old brother. You can't do it, even when you're in the right. You just can't explain a thing like that to your folks. All they'll do is point out how much bigger you are, how unfair it is to your little brother.
— Fred Gipson, Old Yeller
Takin’ it to ISIS, man!” Blue Jacket thumped his chest twice, and I read the saying on his shirt: Turning ISIS into WASWAS.
— Jennifer Lane, Spiked
Death is buried there into death Hunger strikes on its own last breathNo spine to shiver, no heart talks At life’s craving poverty mocksFrom the poem 'Exhumation
— Munia Khan, To Evince the Blue
In the years that I could not see him, I came to know my father through the medium of photography. My perceptions of him were forged on black-and-white squares that stole an instant out of history and immortalized it between the pages of a family album. When I summoned up the image of the man, it came to me frozen, black-bordered, flat. He stood pale above the creases of his uniform, framed in the foamy wake of some ship, drops of sunlight caught in the buttons on his jacket. He winked at me from the liberty ports of countless exotic places. In an atrocious hand he scrawled stilted, affectionate words to the stranger that bore his name and his features, telling of adventures far away, misbehavings under suns hotter than that which shone over the Greater German Reich.
— Miles Watson, Shadows and Glory
That was the funny thing. What happened to John would pass for his classmates, but for John it was a long challenging road ahead of him. Who knew where he would be sent, maybe a juvenile detention center? He might keep in touch with a few friends if his parents let him, but he would never return to Wakefield High. His peers had no clue the journey ahead of him, that his life was changed forever.	And they had no idea what lay ahead for Lilly. No one knew she had been given a task by the Archangels to fight a war against pure evil. They had no idea that Lilly would spend most of her free time not training for a marathon, but training to kill demons. John and Lilly were not all too different.
— Ellie Elisabeth
We have come to the determination to die, all of us, rather than abandon our God, and our religion.
— Jeanne D'Albret
Inequality and poverty, unhealth and no wealth are hand in hand. And if we are all born equal that should be true in all lands. We cannot divide the world between poor and rich countries. It's like saying the ones are good, the others are junkies. That can only increase more prejudice, miseries and sorrow. Turning the wheel today it will lead to a better tomorrow.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, The Mysterious Murder of Marilyn Monroe
No one knew much about the Twenty-Eighth Infantry. It was not a glamour outfit. They knew about the Big Red One and the Screaming Eagles, about the Eighty-Second Airborne and Hell On Wheels, but not about Twenty-Eighth Infantry. The name was met with a certain silence, as if he was in a room full of Harvard graduates and told them his degree was by correspondence.
— Miles Watson, A Story Never Told
The Jews are cowering along the wall, eyes wide, palms up, fingers splayed -- a collective posture of submission. Even now, with everything that has happened, with the city in ruins and the dead as thick upon the streets as busted glass, they don't want to believe we are actually going to kill them. We are Germans, after all; the most civilized people in Europe. And we are soldiers, not murderers. Except for today. Today we are both.
— Miles Watson, The Action
The Kremlin has made a habit of accusing others of crimes of which it has been accused of itself [228]
— Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
She borrowed in harmony and paid back in war
— Charmaine J. Forde
How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.
— Svetlana Alexievich, Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka
The “Lost Day” film and the comments by Putin and Medvedev have revealed a great deal: that the invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was indeed a preplanned aggression and that so-called “Russian peacekeepers” in South Ossetia and Abkhazia were in fact the vanguard of the invading forces that were in blatant violation of Russia’s international obligations and were training and arming the separatist forces.The admission by Putin that Ossetian separatist militias acted as an integral part of the Russian military plan transfers legal responsibility for acts of ethnic cleansing of Georgian civilians and mass marauding inside and outside of South Ossetia to the Russian military and political leadership. Putin’s admission of the prewar integration of the Ossetian separatist militias into the Russian General Staff war plans puts into question the integrity of the independent European Union war report, written by Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini that accused the Georgians of starting the war and attacking Russian “peacekeepers,” which, according to Tagliavini, warranted a Russian military response.
— Павел Фельгенгауэр
Wild animals are less wild and more human than many humans of this world
— Munia Khan
The outcome of battle is never in a warrior’s control. What is in his control is how he chooses to fight and what he chooses to fight for. Today, I choose to fight to keep the Anartas and Sindhuvarta free of the invaders – and I choose to fight such that the enemy will speak of me in their legends for generations to come.
— Shatrujeet Nath, The Conspiracy at Meru
Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
In battle, it is not the strongest or the bravest or those with the greater numbers who win. Victory belongs to the side that best understands the price of defeat.
— Shatrujeet Nath, The Conspiracy at Meru
England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.
— Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
It’s not that. It’s just… never mind. Water under the bridge.” I stand up and head for my room. Two against one. No man ever won this war. It’s why we fight them against other men. At least there is a chance at victory.
— Faleena Hopkins, Cocky Roomie
Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was “This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy.” That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one’s memory.
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.
— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name.
— Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
Everything is fair and possible in love, war, and politics.
— Chandana Roy
The war had remade her. Reshaped her purpose. Why couldn’t she unmake it again?
— Kameron Hurley, The Body Project
Nobody returned alive from the war.
— Andrija Jonić
Can't be on the front lines fighting a war with the weapons given to you by the enemy.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Human survival requires that nation-states give up the institution of war and replace it with a cooperatively-functioning global peace system - for the well-being and security of all people everywhere.
— Douglas P. Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views
Girls with poison necklacesto save themselves from torture.Just as women wear amuletswhich hold their rolled up fortunestranscribed on ola leaf.
— Michael Ondaatje, Handwriting
For a chic and an honorable full victory, you must make your own fight and win your own battle entirely by yourself! Try to refuse any help to get a pure victory, a victory which belongs merely to yourself!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt...
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.
— Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
This arrogant, perfumed young noble, in his rustling silks and polished lamellar armour, knew nothing of the hardships of war.
— David Pilling, Flame of the West
Killings by cops on the job continued to rise. . . . they became an institutionalized way for police to settle scores."We stopped being peacekeeping police and turned into troops at war," Mário Sérgio said.
— Juliana Barbassa, Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink
This was about more than semantics; it represented a dangerous shift in perspective.Rio was not at war, I pointed out; and even if it were, wars have rules.
— Juliana Barbassa, Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink
I’m tired of your revenge, your anger, your hate. The war is killing you.
— Sally Green, Half Lost
And because the condition of man . . . is a condition of war of every one against every one, in which case every one is governed by his own reason, and there is nothing he can make use of that may not be a help unto him in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth that in such a condition every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war. The first branch of which rule containeth the first and fundamental law of nature, which is: to seek peace and follow it. The second, the sum of the right of nature, which is: by all means we can to defend ourselves.
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Today words like 'persevere' and 'hero’s death' had been so ceaselessly bandied about that they had long since acquired an ironic sound—at least wherever there was actual fighting. . . . Once, before an attack, Sturm had heard an old sergeant say the following: 'Kids, we’re going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen’s rations.' It was the best battle address that he had ever heard. That was surely something good in the war—that it destroyed glorious-sounding phrases. Concepts that hung fleshless in the void were overcome by laughter.
— Ernst Jünger, Sturm
Created by wars that required it, the machine now created the wars it required.
— Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Imperialism; And, Social Classes
While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence.
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people.
— Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes: Two Essays by Joseph Schumpeter
In her head is warAll the time just warI put her to bedI bring peace to the world
— Darnell Lamont Walker
I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.
— Lauren Wolk, Wolf Hollow
It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords.
— Dean F. Wilson, Skyshaker
It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics.
— Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story
Oh, the child you threatened once, the young shoot you stepped on, the Tamil you teased, is standing with a gun in front of you. His presence is taking you by surprise. How can you understand that it is the occupier who creates a poorali? You once dealt the blow. Now you are imprisoned. When a fox tries to eat the goat, the goat must turn into a tiger and leap. That is the edict of the times.
— Malaravan
It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
Imprisoned peace sets the war free
— Munia Khan