c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are - if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead.
— David James Duncan, The Brothers K
There was something wild about her, as if she was connected to this place but not the people.
— David Metzenthen, Dreaming the Enemy
To accuse nations (not leaders or governments) is the hallmark of the demo-nationalist of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it leads to endless hatreds, feelings of revenge, misunderstandings, and frictions. It is the surest guarantee for perpetual mass wars.
— Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Menace Of The Herd: Or, Procrustes At Large
....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.
— Ausma Zehanat Khan, The Unquiet Dead
The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects, their wives, their children, their families, their neighbours? How can you justify this?
— Imran Khan
Anything Freed with Guns will Go Back Eventually.
— Vineet Raj Kapoor
...Want to knowwhy my roses grow dead ona living vine? Prayer against civil war. Letus hate with a single heart. Don'tdrink the runoff. I always wanted a ruinso I bought a run-'er-down. Lovecontaminates
— Robin Schiff
When you start a fire, be to windward of it. Do not attack from the leeward.
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Matelon gripped both her hands. “We are soldiers,” he said. “We are not game pieces on a board. Don’t let them play us. Give this thing a chance.”Lyss gently pulled free. “You’re wrong, Captain,” she said. “We never had a chance. At the end of the day, that is all that we are—game pieces. If you don’t know that by now, you soon will.
— Cinda Williams Chima, Shadowcaster
...And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to support temperance, while they actually derive the larger part of their income from intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to which they owe their power; just as they pretend to care for the improvement of the laboring classes, while on oppression of the workman rest the very foundations of the State; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity, when Christianity is subversive of every government.
— Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Nine-nine of every hundred among you probably desire peace, while the balance may hold war a condition to be preferred; but what can be the mental norm of statesmanship where such a minority conquer the peace-lovers?
— Eden Phillpotts, Saurus
-“Forced love hurts God.” -“How can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?”-“At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.”- “I was once so open to the world it hurts”- “Act natural is the worst thing you can say to an actor. They simply forget how to be.”-“Until the first thing they learn are the last thing they forget.” -“It wasn’t just talking back to him, it was the confidence to be calm doing it.”-“The fact that the nation has gone to war does not make those who opposed it at the beginning, and those who oppose it now, traitors.”-“This beauty is a force, and it will never lose.”-“how a cause cements two people, masks their differences as secondary to the purpose at hand”-
— Anna Funder, All That I Am
War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror
— Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom .... These are the beginnings of sorrows.
— Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Goodbye Piccadilly
History is full of examples of slaughter and victory.
— Bobby Adair, Ebola K: Book 2
Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
— Jasmina Tešanović, The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade
I think of myself as a political idiot. Idiot, in ancient Greece, denoted a common person without access to knowledge and information--all women, by definition, and most men. I am unable to make judgments. I see no options I can identify with. Is that normal?
— Jasmina Tešanović, The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade
Do you know what we call windows in Belgrade?' she asked. All our windows are broken and crisscrossed with scotch tape. 'Windows 99.
— Jasmina Tešanović
The worst stories usually make you think: 'but nobody had to die'.These are called true stories.
— Moonshine Noire
Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.
— John Owen Theobald, These Dark Wings
It was a lesson the world had already taught me and was teaching me still. You don't know what's possible until you actually see it.
— Amanda Lindhout, A House in the Sky
You are here because some sliver of existence within you says that you are a born fighter. That you will put your life before others, and stand when others fall.
— Melissa West
Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
No one warrior, no protestor, no member of the silent majority walked away from the Vietnam war unscathed.
— Joseph M. Puglia
Hero,” he said softly, in a manner that was much like his father’s. “Vengeance and glory are the ways of the Greeks and the Trojans. We are of the Herdsmen.
— Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus
This cyberwar will be a continuous marathon war that will only compound and hyper-evolve in stealth, sophistication and easy entry due to the accelerated evolution of “as a service” attack strategies for sale on the dark web.
— James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
Knights do protect ladies, but only to keep them from being abducted by other knights.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
If you survive in battle, it is with Odin's grace, and if you fall, it is because he has betrayed you.
— Neil Gaiman
The greatest war story ever told commemorates a war that established no boundaries, won no territory, and furthered no cause.
— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance.
— Sulari Gentill, Chasing Odysseus
This, the only occasion in the Iliad when furious Achilles smiles serves as a bittersweet reminder of the difference real leadership could have made to the events of the Iliad. Agamemnon's panicked prize-grabbing in Book One and even Nestor's rambling "authority" pale beside Achilles' instinctive and absolute command of himself and the dangers of this occasion.
— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
Surely, by all convention, the Iliad will end here, with the triumphant return of its vindicated hero. But the Iliad is not a conventional epic, and at the very moment of its hero's greatest military triumph, Homer diverts his focus from Achilles to the epic's two most important casualties, Patroklos and Hektor: it is to the consequences of their deaths, especially to the victor, that all action of the Iliad has been inexorably leading.
— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
Homer's epic does not tell of such seemingly essential events as the abduction of Helen, for example, nor of the mustering and sailing of the Greek fleet, the first hostilities of the war, the Trojan Horse, and the sacking and burning of Troy. Instead, the 15,693 lines of Homer's Iliad describe the occurrences of a roughly two-week period in the tenth and final year of what had become a stalemated siege of Troy.
— Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War
During a famine, the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel abandon them in a forest so that they will starve to death. The children stumble upon an edible house inhabited by a witch, who imprisons Hansel and fattens him up in preparation for eating him. Fortunately Gretel shoves the witch into a fiery oven, and “the godless witch burned to death in a horrible way.” 41 • Cinderella’s stepsisters, when trying to squeeze into her slippers, take their mother’s advice and cut off a toe or heel to make them fit. Doves notice the blood, and after Cinderella marries the prince, they peck out the stepsisters’ eyes, punishing them “for their wickedness and malice with blindness for the rest of their lives.” Snow White arouses the jealousy of her stepmother, the queen, so the queen orders a hunter to take her into the forest, kill her, and bring back her lungs and liver for the queen to eat. When the queen realizes that Snow White has escaped, she makes three more attempts on her life, two by poison, one by asphyxiation. After the prince has revived her, the queen crashes their wedding, but “iron slippers had already been heated up for her over a fire of coals.... She had to put on the red-hot iron shoes and dance in them until she dropped to the ground dead.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
I disagreed with the conduct of the war, with bombing civilians, categorizing everyone as the enemy or simply as armed men, with the racism and the disregard for those people.
— Joe Glenton, Soldier Box: Why I Won't Return to the War on Terror
This isn't an army marching on the Mists. This isn't a case you have to solve. It's just a bunch of nobles coming to puff their chests out at each other an try to look important. Do what I do. Bring popcorn.
— Seanan McGuire, Once Broken Faith
Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
War is hot, not cold.
— Kenneth Eade, Russian Holiday
People have always expected the end of the world to be a dramatic, thematic event: war, disease, a sudden explosion. But what if the end of the world has already occurred? What if our final demise happened slowly, secretly … and we’ve been oblivious to it all?
— Caroline George, The Vestige
It doesn’t take a declaration, or an invasion, to start a war, all it takes is an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ And a spark.
— Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders
...but the power of spilled blood overwhelmed the good intentions of those who wanted to end the violence.
— Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
Came they, in their droves, one after the other, hundred after hundred, thousand after thousand, engulfing all before them, each line a merciless wave from a boundless sea of bold men.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil.
— Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
The northern soldiers are just men,” Hal told the men in his command. “And women,” he amended. “When you cut them, they bleed, just like us.
— Cinda Williams Chima, Shadowcaster
Even when we win, we lose, Lyss thought.
— Cinda Williams Chima, Shadowcaster
Music in war is a candle in the darkness
—  it is a kindness in the Land of Rudeness
We grow old without knowing the reason.We build the walls for no good reason.We start the wars for lack of any reason.And we cry foul, when we all knew the real reason.Is it any wonder then, that we do the things we do.When all we have to do, which is hard for a lot of you,Is reason!
— Anthony T. Hincks
War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?
— James S.A. Corey
All war is philosophical. That's why we call it war. Strip it of its paint and it's nothing more than murder.
— Roshani Chokshi, A Crown of Wishes
She kissed their knife marred bodies, for every act of war has, at its heart, an act of mercy.
— Spencer Ellsworth, Swords & Steam Short Stories
There are several ways to wear a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of a hat, but not with a helmet. It won't go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.
— John Steinbeck, Once There Was a War
I don't know how it got to this, but I'm in a war. There's no chance for diplomacy. They want me dead and I don't think I can run from this. Not after what they've done to me. So if this is a war, then I'm going to take the fight to them. I'll raid their lair and I'll kill as many as I can. There seem to be endless numbers of them, but they've got to have a limit. Tonight we'll find out if there are more of them than there is fight in me.
— Dennis Liggio, Support Your Local Monster Hunter
What is the life of one person worth? Although the Supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, life to him is relatively cheap, after all he had his half-brother murdered. The countries population of almost 25 million people is harshly subjugated and the military consists of 5,200,000 men and women both active and in the reserves. Although his military ranks as 25th of the worlds military powers, it is the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that makes Kim Jong-un so dangerous. It is estimated that they have about a dozen nuclear devices that could most likely be delivered as far as Japan. Of course their future targets, including the United States are more ambitious. In contrast to their troop strength, the United States has 1,400,000 personnel under arms, South Korea has only 624,465 and China has 2,333,000 personnel. Our advantage is primarily technical, however regardless of our superiority in battlefield technology, oil which they get from China, remains the lifeblood of their supporting economy and army. North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at the U. S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam. The reality of a war is that we would most likely win such a conflict but at a very high cost. The biggest losers of a war on the Korean Peninsula would be South Korea, North Korea and the United States in that order. If there were to be a winner it would be Russia. What are we thinking? Perhaps we should come up with a better strategy.
— Captain Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba
I’ve fought for and against pretty much every cause there is. There will always be war of some kind. At first it was over fertile soil and good water, then precious metal and then the most popular version of human disagreement, ‘My God is better than your God.’ Whether you draw your faith from Jeremiah and Jesus, Allah and Muhammad or Brahma and Buddha, it doesn’t matter. Someone will tell you you’re wrong, and he’ll fight you over it. Me, I believe in aliens, and to hell with all earthly gods. In the grand scheme of a trillion planets in the universe we’re just not that damn important anyway. And humans are rotten to the core.
— David Baldacci, The Camel Club
-“I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.”-“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.”-“My point is we never learn!
— David Baldacci, The Camel Club
I remember my father telling me about England’s redrawing of India’s boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused.”“You keep proving my point, Tom, that we’re rotten to the core.”“My point is we never learn!
— David Baldacci, The Camel Club
In all our human squabbles, threats of nuclear war, denying climate change, we hardly stop to think of the trees that bend in the wind, the bird that feeds it's young, and the elephants bedding down for the night as we toy with the destruction of this gift given to them.
— Eileen Anglin
What makes a human being want to kill another who has done him no personal harm? Patriotism.
— Theresa Breslin, Remembrance
Peace that follows battle is a futile peace. It is time to count dead and to assess which side stands closer to the win.
— J.E. DiPalo
Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.
— Upton Sinclair, World's End
For me, no ideological or political conviction would justify the sacrifice of a human life. For me, the value of life is absolute, with no concessions. It's not negotiable.
— Edgar Ramirez
You can’t demand peace, but you can reduce the reasons for war.
— Colin R. Turner
A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage.
— Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I spent hours apart by myself, taking stock of where I stood, mentally, on this my thirtieth birthday. It came to me queerly how, four years ago, I had meant to be a general and knighted, when thirty. Such temporal dignities were now in my grasp, only that my sense of falsity of the Arab position had cured me of crude ambition: while it left me craving for good repute among men. This craving made me profoundly suspect my truthfulness to myself. Only too good an actor could so impress his favorable opinion. Here were the Arabs believing me, Allenby and Clayton trusting me, my bodyguard dying for me: and I began to wonder if all established reputations were founded, like mine, on fraud.
— T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
If you are not a Conchie, what are you man?' demanded the Major.After some moments' thought, Francis said, 'I am a human being who does not believe in killing my fellow man for insufficient reason.
— Theresa Breslin, Remembrance
In a war, you wield every weapon you have, including words. Especially words.
— Fonda Lee, Exo
Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.
— Harry Patch, The Last Fighting Tommy: The Life of Harry Patch, the Oldest Surviving Veteran of the Trenches
If their social institutions were abhorrent, their unwritten constitution bordered upon the absurd. The absolutist monarchs of the ancient kingdoms of Amara looked with detestation at the Shazarian constitutional monarchy. Yet this was no time to demonstrate loathing of the upstart nation; condescension could wait until after Sixto had been defeated.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
As the map of the Great Plain was being redrawn by a young Shazarian councillor, the ageing Shylonian king interrupted mid-speech to ask him his name. With a piercing glare and a haughty flick of his cloak, he retorted ‘Lord Ratilla, Shazarian Imperial Secretary, and who might you be?’ Behind the gasps of horror, the message was clear. It was Shazaria who now bestrode the Amaran world, henceforth the office of Shazarian minister now held greater prestige than even that of foreign monarchs. What became even clearer were the depths of Shazarian treachery. The impudent youth who stood before the kings of Amara stripping them of ancient provinces, was the same adolescent reputed to have delivered an eloquent speech which swayed the Shazarian councillors in favour of war.Had this been their intention all along?
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
To achieve peace,we needed to have a war to start with.
— Anthony T. Hincks
Do not think of defeat if the battle is not won yet
— Jordache Wee
I glance at my boots. They are big and clumsy, the breeches are tucked into them, and standing up one looks well-built and powerful in those great drainpipes. But when we go bathing and strip, suddenly we have slender legs again and slight shoulders. We are no longer soldiers but little more than boys; no one would believe that we could carry packs. It is a strange moment when we stand naked; then we become civilians, and almost feel ourselves to be so. When bathing Franz Kemmerich looked as slight and frail as a child. There he lies now -- buy why? The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: "That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn't want to die. Let him not die!
— Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more
— Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
A siege is always a hospital - a hospital where mad thoughts abound and where mad things are done; where, under the stimulus of an unnatural excitement, new beings are evolved, beings who, while having the outward shape of their former selves, and, indeed, most of the old outward characteristics, are yet reborn in some subtle way and are no longer the same....The salt of life! Is it true, or is it merely a mistake, such as life-loving man naturally makes? For it can be nothing but the salt of death which has lain for a brief instant on the tongue of every soldier - a revolting salt which the soldier refuses to swallow and only is compelled to with strange cries and demon-like mutterings. Sometimes, poor mortal, all his struggles and his oaths are in vain. The dread salt is forced down his throat and he dies. The very fortunate have only an acrid taste which defines analysis left them. Of these more fortunate there are, however, many classes. Some, because they are neurotic or have some hereditary taint, the existence of which they have never suspected, in the end succumb; others do not entirely succumb but carry traces to their graves; yet others do not appear to mind at all. It is a very subtle poison, which may lie hidden in the blood for many months and years. I believe it is a terrible thing....And yet even this nobody understands or cares to speak of... Englishmen are proud, and want to know if you were inside the British Legation, their Legation, and when they have heard yes or no their interest ceases. They little know what the Legation stood for. The Americans march up to the Tartar Wall, talk about "Uncle Sam's boys," and exclaim that it requires no guessing to tell who saved the Legations. The French are the same, so are the Germans, so even the Italians. Only the Japanese and the Russians say nothing....I am, therefore, tired of it all, inexpressibly tired. I wish to escape from my hospital, to go away to some clean land where they understand so little of such things that their indifference will in the end, perhaps, convince me and make me forget.Yet can one ever forget?
— B.L. Putnam Weale
Imagine living in a world where we no longer believe that war can lead to peace. War can't lead to peace anymore than ignorance can lead to knowledge. War leads to premature death, pain, suffering, hatred, fear and more separation.
— Renée Paule, Just Around The Bend: Más o Menos
I thought I lost you""You will never lose me." Paul kissed the top of her head. "And even if I have to leave, you must know that I will come back to you again. If you'll wait for me?
— Caroline Leech, Wait for Me
That's my secret and my shame. I'm Nona Grey, war is in my veins, and the screams of my enemies are music to me.
— Mark Lawrence, Red Sister
I sometimes think that normal, everyday life is only a delusion. We walk on a think crust of earth which we call peace; and every now and again we can hear a rumble below our feet; and sometimes the crust splits and we see that, underneath there is a glowing inferno ready to erupt. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, but it is always there.
— Helen MacInnes, Decision at Delphi
Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
The soldiers had been entrenched in their positions for several weeks but there was little, if any fighting, except for the dozen rounds they ritually exchanged every day. The weather was extremely pleasant. The air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and nature seem to be following its course, quite unmindful of the soldiers hiding behind rocks and camouflaged by mountain shrubbery. The birds sang as they always had and the flowers were in bloom. Bees buzzed about lazily. Only when a shot rang out, the birds got startled and took flight, as if a musician had struck a jarring note on his instrument. It was almost the end of September, neither hot nor cold. It seemed as if summer and winter had made their peace. In the blue skies, cotton clouds floated all day like barges on a lake.The soldiers seemed to be getting tired of this indecisive war where nothing much ever happened. Their positions were quite impregnable. The two hills on which they were placed faced each other and were about the same height, so no one side had an advantage. Down below in the valley, a stream zigzagged furiously on its stony bed like a snake.The air force was not involved in the combat and neither of the adversaries had heavy guns or mortars. At night, they would light huge fires and hear each other's voices echoing through the hills.From The Dog of Titwal, a short story.
— sadat hasan manto
Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.
— Robert Hicks, The Widow of the South
Any leader who feel the pain and fight for you. Support him or you lose but if that leader doesn't feel the pain and fight for you. Don't support him, fight for yourself, be a leader and fight for others.
— Saminu Kanti
... it would matter ... to the tens of thousands of young Americans ... who would ... be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.
— Stephen King, 11/22/63
he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn’t more or less relinquished poetry by then.
— Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening
— Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven
When you're in bed to-night think not of wars, But rather of the Panda fast asleep, Her piebald head cushioned on woolly paws; Or think of velvet mice that warmly creepInto their holes to curl up round and soft. Transfer your thoughts from bellicose affairs;Though it be true that bombers fly aloft,Try to reflect on little furry 
— Virginia Graham, Consider the Years
Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they've done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.
— Pat Barker, Life Class
The luckiest generation in a country is always the one which has never went through any war in their lifetimes!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
No Two person are enemies to each other unless on joins politics
— irrfan ishaq
The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad.
— George Orwell, 1984
And Death fell with me, like a deepening moan.And He, picking a manner of worm, which half had hidIts bruises in the earth, but crawled no further,Showed me its feet, the feet of many men,And the fresh-severed head of it, my head.
— Wilfred Owen, The Poems Of Wilfred Owen
Nothing seems to tempt fate more than mentioning the possibility of something bad happening.
— Donald G. Firesmith, Demons on the Dalton
I don't want truth, Palmer; I want smoke!" Captain Ahearn: Waiting For Willie Pete
— Byron Edgington
Give me a book and I may change the world, give me a weapon and there will be no world to change.
— Raouf Reda Habib
She now discovered amidst them, the poet's flights of fancy, and the historian's seldom pleasing—ever instructive page. The first may transmit to posterity the records of a sublime genius, which once flashed in strong, but transient rays, through the tenement of clay it was given a moment to inhabit: and though the tenement decayed and the spirit fled, the essence of a mind which darted through the universe to cull each created and creative image to enrich an ever-varying fancy, is thus snatched from oblivion, and retained, spite of nature, amidst the mortality from which it has struggled, and is freed. The page of the historian can monarchs behold, and not offer up the sceptre to be disencumbered of the ponderous load that clogs their elevation! Can they read of armies stretch upon the plain, provinces laid waste, and countries desolated, and wish to be the mortal whose vengeance, or whose less fierce, but fatal decision sent those armies forth!
— Mary Charlton, The Pirate of Naples
War has often been called a game, with good reason. Both have combatants. Both have sides. Both carry the risk of losing.
— Samantha Shannon, The Song Rising
The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play.
— Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself.Well, the rabble could. The rabble would.He would lead the rabble in managing.The thing would be won.
— George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
The blood of the setting sun suddenly spilled out on the western horizon like that of millions of people who have died in some violent war that has broken out between Earth and Heaven. Suddenly the war ended in defeat and all-embracing darkness descended and pervaded all four corners of the globe, wiping out the sadness and shyness that was in her eyes.
— Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North
Well, good luck,’ the Vietnam verbal tic...It was as though people couldn’t stop themselves from saying it, even when they actually meant to express the opposite wish, like, ‘Die, motherfucker.’ Usually it was only an uninhabited passage of dead language, sometimes it came out five times in a sentence, like punctuation, often it was spoken flat side up to telegraph the belief that there wasn’t any way out; tough shit, sin loi, smack it, good luck. Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck: to friends in the press corps going out on operations, to grunts I’d meet at firebases and airstrips, to the wounded, the dead and all the Vietnamese I ever saw getting fucked over by us and each other, less often but most passionately to myself, and though I meant it every time I said it, it was meaningless. It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’ You could make all the ritual moves, carry your lucky piece, wear your magic jungle hat, kiss your thumb knuckle smooth as stones under running water, the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion. All you could say that wasn’t fundamentally lame was something like, ‘He who bites it this day is safe from the next,’ and that was exactly what nobody wanted to hear.
— Michael Herr, Dispatches
I had been sent away to help guarantee and perpetuate this indifference. No one, here, knew what was happening anywhere else. Perhaps no one ever knows that, anywhere: wherever "here" may be, it must always happen "here" before it can be perceived to have happened. And then, it is not really perceived, it is simply endured. Out of this endurance come, for the most part, alas, monuments, legends, and lies. People cling to these in order to deny that what happened is always happening; that what happened is not an event skewered and immobilized by time, but a continuing and timeless mirror of ourselves.
— James Baldwin
Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.
— Darrell Drake, A Star-Reckoner's Lot
People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in—a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.
— John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal
...And unpredictability can spread: one powerful outlier can pave the way for others, and as more states joint the outlier, the foundations of the rule of law begin to crumble.US counterterrorism practices--and the legal theories that under-pin them--are undermining the international rule of law in precisely this way...
— Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon
You can't win because of the guns," said Adam with a sigh. "Machine guns, mortars, field guns, howitzers: it doesn't matter how much courage soldiers have, how much will; flesh and blood can't pass through bullets and shells, or at least not in sufficient numbers to have any effect. The guns win in the end and they always will. Not us, not the Germans - the guns.
— Simon Tolkien, No Man's Land
The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Ask him where his shame is." They spoke. "He says this is war. There is no shame in war." "Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
What does it matter who is ruler of a realm that no longer exists?
— Krishna Udayasankar, Three
... Blood pounded inside his skull.The pounding became more distinct. A thundering and a racing of hoofs, rising like a storm over the hills to the north. The triumphant baying of the Saxon war-horns was echoed by others, more distant. These were higher, shriller, the prelude to the storm.Cavalry bugles. Bedwyr's lungs were full of smoke and blood, else he would have laughed.The dragon had come at last.
— David Pilling, Artorius
To destroy the life that dwells in othersis beyond your power. The life of those you have slainhas vanished from your eyes, but is not destroyed. Youthought to lengthen your own life and to shorten theirs,but you cannot do this. Life knows neither time norspace. The life of a moment, and the life of a thousandyears: your life and the life of all the visible and invisiblebeings in the world, are equal. To destroy life, or to alterit, is impossible; for life is the one thing that exists. Allelse, but seems to us to be.
— Leo Tolstoy
Telling my story was supposed to be a good thing but it had just made everything worse.
— Sara Nović, Girl at War
I was so tired of his being even-keeled in the face of all that was upsetting and ugly and illogical.
— Sara Nović, Girl at War
My mother used to say, Preeto, there is never a right or a wrong side to a problem, but there can be to people. Not everyone here is on the right side, not everyone there is. You need to ask yourself, which side do you want to be on?
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
All they want is to point a finger.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
Once you are a warrior, you must live like one. You can't be afraid to fight against and destroy anything that fights against what is right.
— Melita Tessy, Battle of the Spheres: Crust, Mantle and Core
You killed the mandir in their homes, you killed the masjid in ours.
— Sanchit Gupta, The Tree with a Thousand Apples
No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.
— Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War
In a war, the first casualty is human dignity.
— Paulo Coelho, The Spy
Yes, there are plenty of politicians who are liars, there is no doubt about this! But some of them are not only liars but also serial killers because they deliberately send people to the wars!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Be resolved that honor is heavier than the mountains and death lighter than the feather.
— Yasuo Kuwahara, Kamikaze: A Japanese Pilot's Own Spectacular Story of the Famous Suicide Squadrons
Ever since you and I were boys of fifteen, I have been in countless battles, from skirmishes to giant wars that determined the fate of nations; if there is one thing I have learned from all that experience, Garanth, it is that battles are alive. Battles are living things. As with beasts, you must try to know them, you must handle them with care and some love, but you must never take your eyes off them, or they will go for your throat. Battles are wild beasts that can never be truly tamed, Garanth. You need both a whip and meat if you want them to turn on your foes and not yourself. The general . . . does not understand this.
— Kaoru Kurimoto, The Battle of Nospherus
What is left after war is silence: The silence of the death
—  the silence of the debris
I have this feeling that immigrants unwittingly help to keep peace between nations by being scapegoats for national ills that would otherwise be blamed on neighbours.
— Agona Apell
Another such victory over the Romans, and we are undone.
— Pyrrhus
I do not hope for a world at peace, all of it, all the time. I do not believe in the perfectibility of man, which is what would be required for world peace; I only believe in the human race. I believe the human race must continue.
— Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War
A hero is a matter of perspective. The only sure thing in war is casualties. Ideology, patriotism and religious zeal all fuel heroic notions.
— Matt Hawkins, Aphrodite IX: Rebirth, Vol. 1
Only when life is quiet, Empress," Oli said. "When the battle comes our way or we see a need, we will pick up our swords and fight beside the bravest of men, even knowing we may fall. But once all is well again... that's when the darkness comes. Then we sit in silence and struggle to grasp our peace the best we can.
— Jill Williamson, Maelstrom
Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
War means endless waiting, endless boredom. There is no electricity, so no television. You can't read. You can't see friends. You grow depressed but there is no treatment for it and it makes no sense to complain — everyone is as badly off as you. It's hard to fall in love, or rather, hard to stay in love. If you are a teenager, you seem halted in time.If you are critically ill — with cancer, for instance — there is no chemotherapy for you. If you can't leave the country for treatment, you stay and die slowly, and in tremendous pain. Victorian diseases return — polio, typhoid and cholera. You see very sick people around you who seemed in perfectly good health when you last saw them during peacetime. You hear coughing all the time. Everyone hacks — from the dust of destroyed buildings, from disease, from cold.As for your old world, it disappears, like the smoke from a cigarette you can no longer afford to buy. Where are your closest friends? Some have left, others are dead. The few who remain have nothing new to talk about. You can't get to their houses, because the road is blocked by checkpoints. Or snipers take a shot when you leave your door, so you scurry back inside, like a crab retreating inside its shell. Or you might go out on the wrong day and a barrel bomb, dropped by a government helicopter, lands near you.Wartime looks like this.
— Janine Di Giovanni, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria
Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.
— Yasuo Kuwahara, Kamikaze: A Japanese Pilot's Own Spectacular Story of the Famous Suicide Squadrons
As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds.
— Moonshine Noire
What the war did to the dreamers.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
The seriousness of being part of Operation Desert Storm-the first major foreign crisis for the United States after the end of the Cold War- was never lost upon us.
— Carlos Wallace, The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity
Staring down the reality of war, far from home, asleep among strangers, that familiarity, those memories, those ties kept us going; gave us a reason to persevere; toughened us up.
— Carlos Wallace, The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity
You fight by rules to keep your humanity
— Adam Makos, A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II