c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.
— David Baldacci, The Christmas Train
As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.
— Tiffany Madison
In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.
— Jan Karon, Home to Holly Springs
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
— George Orwell, Burmese Days
The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
— John Hersey, Hiroshima
The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.
— Mark Skousen
The quality of life in our world does not depend on the conflicts that arise, but on our response to them.
— Widad Akreyi
A dead eagle he might have buried, but he had chosen rather to light a fire for a phoenix.
— Edith Pargeter, A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury
He claimed that nearby gun thunder cleared the mind - but most everybody else agreed it made you daft.
— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.
— Javier Cercas
He scarcely knew who was battling whom, who was winning, who was losing, as though he hoped that by doggedly ignoring the war it would return the favor
— Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.
— Michael Herr, Dispatches
There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again.
— Louise Murphy, The True Story of Hansel and Gretel
no one asks poor people if they want war.
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility.
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Action and blood now get the game. Disdain treads on the peaceful name.
— Amos Bronson Alcott
Death and injury caused by armed violence is one of the most shameful epidemics of our age.
— Widad Akreyi
When deliberating, think in campaigns and not battles; in wars and notcampaigns; in ultimate conquest and not wars.
— Steven Pressfield, The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great
Armed violence and peace cannot coexist. We need to overcome the challenges we face and seek practical solutions. We must replace the culture of war with the culture of peace.
— Widad Akreyi
Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France...Shabelsky: Nonsense! ...In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight.Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.
— Anton Chekhov, Ivanov
War is food and drink and disease and patience and anger and hate and cold and stealth and terror as well as sweet silver and bitter iron and the glitter of arms in the sun or under the moon.
— Miles  Cameron, The Dread Wyrm
Each day is an opportunity to build the defenses of peace in the minds of people.
— Widad Akreyi
War is a horribly fascinating thing.
— Robert Sherrod
..when a war ends, what does that look like exactly?do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves?does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glassand our reflection is not something we can stand to look atdoes the white flag make for a perfect blindfold?yesterday i was told a storyabout this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old,who cannot fall asleepbecause when she doesshe dreams of nothingbut the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse.if you told her war is overdo you think she can sleep?
— Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase: By Andrea Gibson
Fighting isn't all there is to the Art of War. The men who think that way, and are satisfied to have food to eat and a place to sleep, are mere vagabonds. A serious student is much more concerned with training his mind and disciplining his spirit than with developing martial skills.
— Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi
As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
It struck me that such analyses had it backward. It’s the American public for whom the Iraq War is often no more real than a video game. Five years into this war, I am not always confident most Americans fully appreciate the caliber of the people fighting for them, the sacrifices they have made, and the sacrifices they continue to make. After the Vietnam War ended, the onus of shame largely fell on the veterans. This time around, if shame is to be had when the Iraq conflict ends - and all indications are there will be plenty of it - the veterans are the last people in America to deserve it. When it comes to apportioning shame my vote goes to the American people who sent them to war in a surge of emotion but quickly lost the will to either win it or end it. The young troops I profiled in Generation Kill, as well as the other men and women in uniform I’ve encountered in combat zones throughout Iraq and Afghanistan, are among the finest people of their generation. We misuse them at our own peril.
— Evan Wright, Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
Never think that war is a good thing, grandchildren. Though it may be necessary at times to defend our people, war is a sickness that must be cured. War is a time out of balance. When it is truly over, we must work to restore peace and sacred harmony once again.
— Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two
In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn't have a care...
— Alex Scarrow, The Eternal War
A soldier's life revolves around his mail. Like many others, I've been able to follow my kid's progress from the day he was born until now he is able to walk and talk a little, and although I have never seen him I know him very well.
— Bill Mauldin, Up Front
This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.
— Sam Shepard, True West
Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated!
— Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to think hopefully of the future.
— Jacqueline Winspear, Maisie Dobbs
There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that need heroes."(King Pelles the Sure)
— Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk about My Brother
If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.
— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Life Is Worth Living
In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
— Robert S. McNamara
All is fair in fashion and war.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
It seems to me, that you people spend a great deal of time talking about honour, but strip away the high sounding words and you are no different from any other race. Family? Has Priam not killed wayward sons? When a king dies do his sons not go to war with one another to succeed him? Men speak of how you reacted to your father's death. They say it was amazing, for you did not order your little brother's execution. Your race thrives on blood and death, Helikaon. Your ships raid the coasts of other nations, stealing slaves, burning and plundering. Warriors brag of how many men they have killed, and women they have raped. Almost all of your kings either seized their thrones with swords and murder, or are children of men who seized power with swords and murder. So put all this talk of honour to one side.
— David Gemmell, Shield of Thunder
...the wrath of God pales beside that of man.
— Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time
It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens.
— Sarah  Miller, The Lost Crown
The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.
— Brenna Yovanoff
No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
This isn't to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors' narrative): both wars were about the country's survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th.... Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.
— George Packer
How many shots had to be fired to turn this child back to his home and anxious mother?
— Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion's Gaze
Nobody could rule this world merely by peace.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean.But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met.To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction from the meeting point.And the two countries are still at war.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
I don't know how to stop the atrocities. I don't know how to make people care. But looking into my sister's eyes, we seem to have carved out something between us that none of the madness can touch. Invisible threads.
— Lisa J. Shannon, A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman
And I'll close by saying this. Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people, I learned, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilisation, and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad. Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college, the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people are being reported from all over Europe today as I'm talking, and we can only expect this to get worse, and we must make sure our own defenses are not neglected. Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this—this pest, by its right name; to make unceasing resistance to it, knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving (some of the time, at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it. Thank you.
— Christopher Hitchens
The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.
— Jeannette Rankin
No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
— Thomas L. Friedman
That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
— William Gibson, Spook Country
Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent.
— Louise Lawrence, Children of the Dust
When I write to please everybody, it falls flat. When I write what I know, fearlessly, It won't please everybody, but it doesn't fall flat.
— Ronald P. Chavez, Winds of Wildfire
I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.
— Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.
— Stephen Crane
They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Dead men are not friends to living men, and give them no gifts.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.''Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")
— David J. Schow, Seeing Red
Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium...Something had happened. The black sky above London burst into fragments: white triangles, squares and lines - the silent geometric delirium of searchlights. The blinded elephant buses rushed somewhere headlong with their lights extinguished. The distinct patter along the asphalt of belated couples, like a feverish pulse, died away. Everywhere doors slammed and lights were put out. And the city lay deserted, hollow, geometric, swept clean by a sudden plague: silent domes, pyramids, circles, arches, towers, battlements.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders And, The Fisher Of Men
While you try to make peace on earth, the inhabitants of heaven are still at war.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world. (p. 160)
— Eknath Easwaran, Nonviolent Soldier of Islam: Badshah Khan: A Man to Match His Mountains
Clear now that she was as dependent as any addict on the drug of the war. He had underestimated the damage in her.
— Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters
War is a proof that idea has boundary.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Whoever won the war, would revise the history.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine.
— Erwin Rommel
All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.
— Walter Benjamin
the main thing is to make history not to write it
— Otto von Bismarck
Who is left in the ghetto is the one man in a thousand in any age, in any culture, who through some mysterious workings of force within his soul will stand in defiance against any master. He is that one human in a thousand whose indomitable spirit will not bow. He is the one man in a thousand whose indomitable spirit cannot bow. He is the one man in a thousand who will not walk quietly to Umschlagplatz. Watch out for him, Alfred Funk, we have pushed him to the wall.
— Leon Uris
For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!
— Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.
— Charles Fourier
Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...
— Stephen King, The Dark Tower
The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
— Sebastian Junger, War
Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.
— Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn't mind. It didn't occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.
— Pat Barker, Regeneration
Think about what it would mean to fight," he said. "Say we barricade ourselves here in the hotel and refuse to leave. They come at us with their Weapon, whatever it is. Some of us are hurt, some die. We go out to meet them with whatever weapons we can find - sticks, maybe, or pieces of broken glass. We battle each other. Maybe they set fire to the hotel. Maybe we march into the village and steal food from them nad they come after us and beat us. We beat them back. In the end, maybe we damage them so badly that they're too weak to make us leave. What do we have? Friends and neighbors and families dead. A place half destroyed, and those left in it full of hatred for us. And we ourselves will have to live with the memory of the terrible things we have done.
— Jeanne DuPrau, The People of Sparks
The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.
— Jefferson Davis
War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.
— Mary Roberts Rinehart
You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
— Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat
Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained.
— Arthur Wellesley
[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.
— John Updike
Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
— Anne Michaels
You do not mean there is danger of peace?", cried Jack.
— Patrick O'Brian, Desolation Island
There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time . . . .We are the boys who go to a particular place, at H-hour, occupy a designated terrain, stand on it, dig the enemy out of their holes, force them then and there to surrender or die. We're the bloody infantry, the doughboy, the duckfoot, the foot soldier who goes where the enemy is and takes him on in person. We've been doing it, with changes in weapons but very little change in our trade, at least since the time five thousand years ago when the foot sloggers of Sargon the Great forced the Sumerians to cry "Uncle!"Maybe they'll be able to do without us someday. Maybe some mad enius with myopia, a bulging forehead, and a cybernetic mind will devise a weapon that can go down a hole, pick out the opposition, adn force it to surrender or die--without killing that gang of your own people they've got imprisoned down there. I wouldn't know; I'm not a genius, I'm an M.I. In the meantime, until they build a machine to replace us, my mates can handle that job--and I might be some help on it, too.
— Robert A. Heinlein
It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.
— Tiffany Madison
The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.
— Hilary Mantel
But, like all metaphoric wars, the copyright wars are not actual conflicts of survival. Or at least, they are not conflicts for survival of a people or a society, even if they are wars of survival for certain businesses or, more accurately, business models. Thus we must keep i mind the other values or objectives that might also be affected by this war. We must make sure this war doesn't cost more than it is worth. We must be sure it is winnable, or winnable at a price we're willing to pay.
— Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
Indeed," Fowler answered. He turned and looked at Tony critically. "I say, old man, but you're not much older than that German kid."Yeah," Tony grinned. "But I'm from Texas and meaner than a junkyard bulldog. Makes a difference, you know.
— Robert L. Wise
As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life
the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy. Do not interfere with an army that is returning home.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy's one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide our army into two.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Whatever your grievances, I'm sure we can address them without resorting to war," persisted Argyle....Nonsense," said the alien. "Do you know how many laborers and industries we'd put out of work if we were to stop the war just because a few bleeding hearts think we can talk out our grievances?
— Mike Resnick, The Outpost
In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did notcompletely trust anyone.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
If we wish to fight, the enemy can be forced to an engagement even though he be sheltered behind a high rampart and a deep ditch. All we need do is attack some other place that he will be obliged to relieve.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last
— George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
— Randall Jarrell
You can only die once, to make sure it's worth it.
— Vladimir Kamarisky
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
This morning there s first a predictable story about Darfur; an expert on African affairs notes that seven thousand African Union troops patrolling a region the size of France have been ineffectual in preventing continued janjaweed terror. Funding for the troops is about to run out, and it seems that no one, including the United States, is ready to put forth more money or come up with new ideas to stop the killing and displacement. This is not surprising to those of us who lived through twenty years of oppression by the hands of Khartoum and its militias.
— Dave Eggers, What Is the What
If you're all so peaceful up there, how did you get such greedy and cruel ideas?"The dragon was silent for a long time after this question. And at last he said: "It just came over me. I don't know why. It just came over me, listening to the battling shouts and the war-cries of the earth - I got excited, I wanted to join in.
— Ted Hughes, The Iron Man
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favourite pastime of the idle and frivolous...
— Leo Tolstoy
He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight the war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn't fight.
— Dalton Trumbo
The human beings also passed canteens, which guards would fill with water. When food came in, the human beings were quiet and trusting and beautiful. They shared.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.
— Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Baby, I was in a war. Of course I get it. That's where all the bad in the world comes from. Guys who like being mean. I was that guy once. We were all that guy, for at least a minute. We had to be.
— Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied
Ronald Spiers: The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.
— Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.
— Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
Brigan, could you attempt, at least, to make yourself presentable? I know this is a war, but the rest of us are trying to pretend it’s a party.
— Kristin Cashore, Fire
Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.
— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
Problems are solved from the inside out not the other way around.
— Vivian Amis
War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.
— Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now
The thing is, you cannot ask people to coexist by having one side bow their heads and rely on a solution that is only good for the other side. What you can do is stop blaming each other and engage in dialogue with one person at a time. Everyone knows that violence begets violence and breeds more hatred. We need to find our way together. I feel I cannot rely on the various spokespersons who claim they act on my behalf. Invariably they have some agenda that doesn't work for me. Instead, I talk to my patients, to my neighbors and colleagues--Jews, Arabs--and I find out they feel as I do: we are more similar than we are different, and we are all fed up with the violence.
— Izzeldin Abuelaish
The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
A bad peace is worse than war.
— Tacitus
Organizations like the UN do a lot of good, but there are certain basic realities they never seem to grasp ...Maybe the most important truth that eludes these organizations is that it's insulting when outsiders come in and tell a traumatized people what it will take for them to heal.You cannot go to another country and make a plan for it. The cultural context is so different from what you know that you will not understand much of what you see. I would never come to the US and claim to understand what's going on, even in the African American culture. People who have lived through a terrible conflict may be hungry and desperate, but they are not stupid. They often have very good ideas about how peace can evolve, and they need to be asked.That includes women. Most especially women ...To outsiders like the UN, these soldiers were a problem to be managed. But they were our children.
— Leymah Gbowee, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War
Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.
— William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
I remember the lightning in the air, and the lovers bidding goodbye to each other in the streets, and I can tell you what I think. We went to war because going to war is fun, because there's something in the human breast that trills at the thought, although perhaps not the reality, of murdering its fellows in vast numbers. Fighting a war ain't fun - fighting a war is pretty miserable. But starting a war? Hell, starting a war is better than a night floating on daeva's honey.
— Daniel Polansky, Low Town
Yes, a war is inevitable. Firstly, there's you fellows who can't be trusted. And then there's the multitude who mean to have bathrooms and white enamel. Millions of them; all over the world. Not merely here. And there aren't enough bathrooms and white enamel in the world to go round.
— Ford Madox Ford, Parade's End
Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and abusrd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.
— John Fowles, The Magus
Of course he was afraid of war. Only fools are not. Anaxantis was no fool. He was fully prepared to fight, but only as a last resort.
— Andrew Ashling, The Invisible Hands - Part 1: Gambit
Victory is always bittersweet.
— Nadia Scrieva
You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin' shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.
— Joseph Bruchac, Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two
for years now there had been no country here but the war.
— Michael Herr, Dispatches
The American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.
— Benjamin Rush
A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, "Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer?" You know the answer, of course.
— George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945
It was strange to us that none of these three victims made any attempt to resist the attack. Indeed, not one inhabitant in any of these worlds considered for a moment the possibility of resistance. In every case the attitude to disaster seemed to express itself in such terms as these:"To retaliate would be to wound our communal spirit beyond cure. We choose rather to die. The theme of spirit that we have created must inevitably be broken short, whether by the ruthlessness of the invader or by our own resort to arms. It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be. We die knowing that the promise of further glory outlives us in other galaxies. We die praising the Star Maker, the Star Destroyer.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
Maybe the Americans should have brought baseballs instead of bombs.
— Ann E. Burg, All the Broken Pieces
She knew enough to recognize that memories were crowding in, and there was nothing he could do. They wouldn’t let him speak. She would never know what scenes were driving that turmoil.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
The world had been divided into two parts that sought to annihilate each other because they both desired the same thing, namely the liberation of the oppressed, the elimination of violence, and the establishment of permanent peace.
— Hermann Hesse, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse
When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen
— Frederick L. Coxen, The Great Promise
One day this war will end. And when it does, Tule Lake will be just a memory.
— Teresa R. Funke, The No-No Boys
Peter had spent his whole life in a town where fights were either drunken and friendly, or silent and petty. True war was foreign to him. He thought of how scared and confused he had been when the battle broke out in the Nest; he was in a different world now.
— Jonathan Auxier, Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes
This is how hatred begins -- with a muffled laugh on a hot night and a knock on the door.
— Teresa R. Funke, Wave Me Good-bye
The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.
— G.K. Chesterton
One day my grandson said to me, grandpa were you a hero in the war? And i said to him no I'm not a hero, but I have served in a company full of them.
— Dick Winters
To the militant, identity is everything.
— Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
He had also learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done.
— Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody: Great Figures of History Hilariously Humbled
Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.We laughed, — knowing that better men would come,And greater wars: when each proud fighter bragsHe wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.
— Wilfred Owen
Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war-how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown.
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars." (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)
— James Clavell
I'm not the kind of faggot who wants to put a rainbow sticker on a machine gun.
— CA Conrad
The guns reminded me that this was just an attempt to punch holes in the darkness that enveloped us now.
— Michael Poeltl, The Judas Syndrome
It's going to be a hard time; we can count on that. But with all the misery, what opportunities to show mercy and brotherly love in our land, which has sinned so greatly against love. And patience! For now is the time when the victors, in the blind triumph of their victory, are likely to make mistakes. But that's not our concern, for we shall only be the sufferers, not the agents of suffering. What a power for peace will lie in our own powerlessness if we can only glimpse in it the sign of grace!
— Margot Benary-Isbert, Dangerous Spring
Be safe, she whispered. Then she closed her eyes and said in a low, broken monotone, "I love you.KailaniSiobhan Fallon
— Siobhan Fallon
He looked around at that one room, and the few things in it. He'd always thought retiring would be going back to his life after some nightmare pause. Some stretch of exile in the land of the dead. Now it came to him that all his life worth living had happened while he was holding a sword.Standing alongside his dozen. Laughing with Whirrun, and Brack, and Wonderful. Clasping hands with his crew before the fight, knowing he'd die for them and they for him. The trust, the brotherhood, the love, the knit closer than family. Standing by Threetrees on the walls of Uffrith, roaring their defiance at Bethod's great army. The day he charged at the Cunmur. And at Dunbrec. And in the High Places, even though they lost. The day he earned his name. Even the day he got his brothers killed. Even when he'd stood at the top of the Heroes as the rain came down, watching the Union come, knowing every dragged out moment might be the last.Like Whirrun said - you can't live more than that. Certainly not by fixing a chair.
— Joe Abercrombie, The Heroes
Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.
— Wilfred Owen, Poems
War is not a means but an end. It makes violence respectable and makes sadists look like heroes.
— Mary Horlock
A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.
— Sandra Day O'Connor
The problems I had existed before I did, and I discovered them.
— Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier
Then the Skopamish showed up. Their chests heaving, rotting eyes like dull raisins in their skulls. Their eyes found mine like a witching wand seeking water.
— Tamara Rose Blodgett, Death Screams
Peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice.
— Harrison Ford
Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.''P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed.
— Stella Gibbons, Starlight
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
... if one hasn't been through, as our people mercifully did not go through, the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does, which has been through all that.
— Anthony Eden
I've lived through a war. I've seen burning corpses on the road side. And yes, I will tell you, peace is the only way out.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
If you asked why the post had not come, or why the boat did not sail for England, or why your coffee was cold, or why your boots were not cleaned, or why your window was shut, or why the canary didn't sing,-you would always be sure to be told, "c'est la guerre!
— Louise Mack, A Woman's Experiences in the Great War: An Australian Author's Clandestine Journey Through War-Torn Belgium
His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music.
— Derek Donais, MetalMagic: Talisman
On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step
— Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil
Pictures could not be accessories to the story -- evidence -- they had to contain the story within the frame
—  the best picture contained a whole war within one frame.