War Quotes

“These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.”

“Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.”

“So what do I do? What do we do? How do we move forward when we are tired and afraid? What do we do when the voice in our head is yelling that WE ARE NEVER GONNA MAKE IT? How do we drag ourselves through the muck when our brain is telling us youaredumbandyouwillneverfinishandnoonecaresanditistimeyoustop? Well, the first thing we do is take our brain out and put it in a drawer. Stick it somewhere and let it tantrum until it wears itself out. You may still hear the brain and all the shitty things it is saying to you, but it will be muffled, and just the fact that it is not in your head anymore will make things seem clearer. And then you just do it. You just dig in and write it. You use your body. you lean over the computer and stretch and pace. You write and then cook something and write some more. you put your hand on your heart and feel it beating and decide if what you wrote feels true. You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing. That is what I know. Writing the book is about writing the book. So here we go, you and me. Because what else are we going to do? Say no? Say no to an opportunity that may be slightly out of our comfort zone? Quiet our voice because we are worried it is not perfect? I believe great people do things before they are ready. This is America and I am allowed to have healthy self-esteem. This book comes straight from my feisty and freckled fingers. Know it was a battle. Blood was shed. A war raged between my jokey and protective brain and my squishy and tender heart. I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write.”

“I think the Cold War was worse for Africa than colonialism.”

“The surest way to prevent war is not to fear it.”

“In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.”

“It is a joyous thing, war.  You love your comrade so much in war.  When you see that your quarrel is just, and your blood is fighting well, tears rise to your eyes. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body.  And then your are prepared to go and live or die with him, and for love not to abandon him.  And out of that, there arises such a delectation, that he who has not experienced it is not fit to say what delight is.  Do you think that a man who does that fears death?  Not at all, for he feels so strengthened, so elated, that he does not know where he is.  Truly he is afraid of nothing.”

“I think the Eritrean government is aware that any full-scale invasion of Ethiopia along the lines of 1998 could turn out to be suicidal... And we will not respond to any provocation short of all-out invasion. We are already engaged in a much more fruitful war - against poverty.”

“We want to know. We want to know who we are and what we are capable of.I want to know.And yet we were dragged into another war. Another seemingly inevitable and gruesome legacy passed down, along with soma.”

“At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.”

“Americans who have parents raised during the Great Depression or World War II understand how drastically things have changed on the home front. My father did not care a whit whether I liked him, and it would have been unthinkable for him to pick up my stuff. There were rules in the house, and they were enforced.”

“War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.”

“Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.”

“Sometimes I think that if we have to go back, then it certainly won't be to Jerusalem. Not to the Jerusalem beset with racism that we left at the height of the last Gaza war.”

“Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”

“The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.”

“I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man's soul.”

“John Austin, author of 'Cubicle Warfare,' has outdone himself with 'Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction,' a fully illustrated step-by-step guide to constructing thirty-five pocket-sized war machines, including a Clothespin Shooter, a Hanger Slingshot, a Paper-Clip Trebuchet, and Shoelace Darts.”

“I want to make love, but my hair smells of war and running and running.”

“Let's be under no illusions: There are attacks on, for example, transgender Americans from the Oval Office, picking on troops - people willing to lay down their lives for this country - not to mention teenagers in our high schools. So we've got to end the war on trans Americans.”