War Quotes

“Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.”

“No, this is pretty much the same version I read," I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war." pg.57”

“At the very outset I want to say how the people of America appreciate the steadfast support of the people of Morocco, the leadership of Morocco in our war against terrorism.”

“Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.”

“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”

“Talk of citizenship today is often thin and tinny. The word has a faintly old-fashioned feel to it when used in everyday conversation. When evoked in national politics, it's usually accompanied by the shrill whine of a descending culture-war mortar.”

“To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.”

“We were told by President Obama that in respect of international trade, we would have to get to the back of the queue - not a position that America normally requires the United Kingdom to be in when it comes to other matters, such as the Iraq War.”

“I found it not inappropriate that the years of frustration and grief and loss, of work and conflict and painful resurrection, should have led me through their dark and devious ways to this new beginning.”

“China's growing military strength presents us with a peer adversary for the first time since the Cold War that can threaten our air superiority, compete with us technologically, and deny or even control our traditional blue water spaces.”

“On 6 October 1973, the Yom Kippur war broke out between a coalition of Arab states and Israel. At 6 A.M. that morning, Kissinger, asleep in the Waldorf, was taken by surprise by the Arab attack - as were the CIA and the rest of the world.”

“Space and time blurred and the void filled with explosions and shards and narrow misses and voices in the Force: his pilots, laughing and swearing and howling to their deaths. He laughed and swore and howled along with them, the silence unbearable.Kill, kill, and kill again, slaughter the starfighters, slaughter the Tuskens, every loss is the same loss, every pain springs from one source. Save Kothlis, save Coruscant, save Padmé. Save them all.”

“If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked.”

“During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)”

“What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.”

“In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that.”

“The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.”

“Man's idea of God, and a God's collusion, is an essential part of the equation to wage war.”

“I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.”

“I think when you've got the dog, you're just born with it, really. The way I was raised in football, you had to have that dog in you a little bit and I go into the games knowing every game's a war and you got to be up for it. I think that's something I have.”