Quotes by Soldiers - Page 2

We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.
Albert Pike
Liberalism is to freedom as anarchism is to anarchy.
Ernst Jünger
As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.
Guy Sajer
Stain not the glory of your worthy ancestors, but like them resolve never to part with your birthright; be wise in your deliberations, and determined in your exertions for the preservation of your liberties. Fllow not the dictates of passion, but enlist yourselves under the sacred banner of reason; use every method in your power to secure your rights.
Joseph Warren
No soldier ever really survives a war.
Audie Murphy
Doing good is the only certainly happy action of a man's life.
Sir Philip Sidney
The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.
Ernst Jünger
With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)...
Garcilaso de la Vega
If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious, but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats. Our people are represented as patriotic heroes, their enemies as grasping imperialists, or subversive rebels. In other words, our national histories are propaganda, not well balanced investigation.
John Bagot Glubb
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
In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on rowThat mark our place; and in the skyThe larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns belowWe are the DeadShort days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow/Loved, and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders FieldsTake up our quarrel with the foeTo you from failing hands we throw The torchbe yours to hold it highIf ye break faith with us who dieWe shall not sleep/though poppies growIn Flanders Fields
John McCrae
All political lives unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture end in failure.
Enoch Powell
It is not good to wake a sleeping lion.
Philip Sidney
The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
The place was silent and - aware.
P.C. Wren
When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead"When you see millions of the mouthless deadAcross your dreams in pale battalions go,Say not soft things as other men have said,That you'll remember. For you need not so.Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they knowIt is not curses heaped on each gashed head?Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,"Yet many a better one has died before."Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should youPerceive one face that you loved heretofore,It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.Great death has made all his for evermore.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
Are you okay, man?""Yeah, I'm good."It's a lie. I wonder if I will ever be good again.
David Bellavia
For you was I born, for you do I have life, for you will I die, for you am I now dying.
Garcilaso de la Vega
My dear my better half.
Philip Sidney
I did not dread the dark winter as people do when they have lost their youth and live alone in some great city.
Siegfried Sassoon
Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.
Siegfried Sassoon
The anarch is (I am simplifying) on the side of gold: it fascinates him, like everything that eludes society. Gold has its own immeasurable might. It need only show itself, and society with its law and order is in jeopardy.The anarch is on the side of gold : this is not to be construed as a lust for gold. He recognizes gold as the central and immobile power. He loves it, not like Cortez, but like Montezuma, not like Pizarro but like Atahualpa ....
Ernst Jünger
When we come under the spell of the deeper domain of technology, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side. Then we realize we that we are involved in a play, a dance of the spirit, which cannot be grasped by calculation. What is ultimately left for science is intuition alone - a call of destiny.This playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. The crude observer can only be impressed by large quantities - chiefly when they are in motion - and yet there are as many organs in a fly as in a leviathan.
Ernst Jünger
Unfortunately robots capable of manufacturing robots do not exist. That would be the philosopher's stone, the squaring of the circle.
Ernst Jünger
Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides.
Ernst Jünger
Today words like 'persevere' and 'hero’s death' had been so ceaselessly bandied about that they had long since acquired an ironic sound—at least wherever there was actual fighting. . . . Once, before an attack, Sturm had heard an old sergeant say the following: 'Kids, we’re going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen’s rations.' It was the best battle address that he had ever heard. That was surely something good in the war—that it destroyed glorious-sounding phrases. Concepts that hung fleshless in the void were overcome by laughter.
Ernst Jünger
War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.
Guy Sajer
As he walked along, consciously enjoying the early coolness of the morning, he turned and looked behind him. People often do this and are usually surprised to find that there is some reason for turning around. Sometimes there is no apparent reason and they wonder why they did it. ("Ordeal By Water")
P.C. Wren
All this, I suspect, has been little more than the operation known as the pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, but I have had a comfortable feeling that, however ordinary my enterprises may have been, they had at any rate the advantage of containing, for me, an element of sustained unfamiliarity. I am one of those persons who begin life by exclaiming they've "never seen anything like this before" and die in the hope that they may say the same of heaven.
Siegfried Sassoon
In Flanders' fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row That mark our place and in the sky The larks still bravely singing fly Scarce heard among the guns below.
John McCrae
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.
Xenophon
I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.
Ernst Jünger
I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare but I can write a book by me.
Sir Walter Raleigh
Fraternity means that the father no longer sacrifices the sons; instead the brothers kill one another. Wars between nations have been replaced by civil war. The great settling of accounts, first under national ‘pretexts,’ led to a rapidly escalating world civil war.
Ernst Jünger
I am a Christian, but my time in Iraq has convinced me that God doesn't want to hear from me anymore. I've done things that He can never forgive. I've done them consciously. I've made decisions I must live with for years to come. I am not a victim. In each instance, I heard my conscience call for restraint, I told it to shut the fuck up and let me handle my business. All the sins I've committed, I've done with one objective: to keep my men alive.
David Bellavia
The farmer works the soil The agriculturist works the farmer.
Eugene F. Ware
I would like to repeat that I do not fancy myself as anything special for being an anarch. My emotions are no different from those of the average man. Perhaps I have pondered this relationship a bit more carefully and am conscious of a freedom to which “basically” everybody is entitled – a freedom that more or less dicates his actions.
Ernst Jünger
But I've grown thoughtful now. And you have lost Your early-morning freshness of surprise At being so utterly mine: you've learned to fear The gloomy, stricken places in my soul, And the occasional ghosts that haunt my gaze.
Siegfried Sassoon
I could not love thee dear so much Loved I not honor more.
Richard Lovelace
I feel like so much has been left undone. There are friends I won't see before I leave, there are bills I still need to pay. I haven't written as much as I've wanted, and there are countless things I've said that I wish I could correct, but this is a process that will never end. When my grandmother died she left a library full of books she never finished reading. This is how I feel now.
Jason Christopher Hartley
...the Moon, the enemy of poets...("Merchant's Two Sons")
Giambattista Basile
Come, Sleep; O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,Th' indifferent judge between the high and low;With shield of proof shield me from out the preaseOf those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw.
Philip Sidney
England is seen at its worst when it has to deal with men like Wilde. In Germany Wilde and Byron are appreciated as authors: in England they still go pecking about their love-affairs. Anyone who calls a book ‘immoral’ or 'moral’ should be caned. A book by itself can be neither. It is only a question of the morality or immorality of the reader. But the English approach all questions of vice with such a curious mixture of curiosity and fear that it’s impossible to deal with them.
Charles Hamilton Sorley
I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.
P.B.S. Pinchback
Mute in that golden silence hung with green,Come down from heaven and bring me in your eyesRemembrance of all beauty that has been,And stillness from the pools of Paradise.
Siegfried Sassoon
Take up our quarrel with the foe! To you from failing hands we throw The torch be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep though poppies grow In Flanders' fields.
John McCrae
The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.
Siegfried Sassoon
The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file
Ernst Jünger
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Philip Sidney
That man is formed for social life is an observation which, upon our first inquiry, presents itself immediately to our view, and our reason approves that wise and generous principle which actuated the first founders of civil government, an institution which hat its origin in the weakness of individuals, and hath for its end the strength and security of all; and so long as the means of effecting this important end are thoroughly known and religiously attended to government is one of the richest blessings to mankind, and ought to be held in the highest veneration
Joseph Warren
The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender nor retreat.
William Travis
When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we began to denounce this trade in African flesh, and to denounce it in no stinted terms.
W. F. Butler
That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph: and that which make our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. The only true happiness is to learn, to advance, and to improve: which could not happen unless we had commenced with error, ignorance, and imperfection. We must pass through the darkness, to reach the light.
Albert Pike
The political trend is always to be observed, partly as a spectacle, partly for one’s own safety. The liberal is dissatisfied with regime; the anarch passes through their sequence – as inoffensively as possible – like a suite of rooms. This is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow – the philosopher, the artist, the believer.
Ernst Jünger
Knowledge leaves no room for chances.
Lew Wallace
A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.
Ernst Jünger
Ernie got it,' I said afterwards. 'His experience taught him that you've got to fight for what's right. It gets you into a lot of trouble but he came to the same conclusion as me.' People think it could never happen here. Don't you believe it; it doesn't take much.
Denis Avey
[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.
Sir Laurens van der Post
May our land be a land of liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed, a name and a praise in the whole Earth, until the last shock of time shall bury the empires of the whole world in one common undistinguished ruin!
Joseph Warren
I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.
Ernst Jünger