War Quotes - Page 26

Saddam's politics was the politics of the thug, of violence from the outset of his reign. Realism suggests that some people are not going to be tractable in response to purely peaceable overtures. Indeed, it certainly appears that some individuals, including notably Saddam Hussein, will cheerfully help themselves to a yard for every inch offered by well-meaning peacemakers. When we are dealing with customers as tough as that, there is no alternative to being tough ourselves.

You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.

Behold, O Lord, yet art thou nigh unto them that be reserved till the end: and what shall they do that have been before me, or we that be now, or they that shall come after us?

The more we prepare for war, the more we make it a reality. Yet, it would seem, to prepare for war may also be the best and possibly the only way to avoid it.’ – Govinda Shauri, The Aryavarta Chronicles - Kurukshetra

During the flames of controversy, opinions, mass disputes, conflict, and world news, sometimes the most precious, refreshing, peaceful words to hear amidst all the chaos are simply and humbly 'I don't know.

I have lived long enough to know that wherever there is crisis there is always Christ. Look for Jesus in the middle of all your crisis. Whenever He comes the whole storm goes down.

I have lived long enough to see God make my enemies my footstool not even footsteps.

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.

Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

If war is not holy man is nothing but antic clay.

The Cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom. The cost of wearing the uniform can be high, but... [very long pause] sometimes it's too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question "Why?" Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. And when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.

God is not interested in helping you finding out why you are in a mess, He is interested in fixing it.

I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them - I held them personally and individually responsible - the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and the farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine outstanding gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalist, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damn complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons.

During the few months Troy had been back home, he’d told his friends about us, and so we quickly eased into the conversation as though we’d all known each other for many years. They embarrassed us with great thanks for having served overseas. They recounted combat events Troy had told them, and we realized by the context of their stories that Troy had made us heroes for his friends because we’d been heroes to him. At this point I was the saddest I’d yet been over Troy’s passing, because the true friend from war is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others.

I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

The most important subject in the curriculum in the future years will be how to love ourselves and be content.

Human beings are born for peace; they like to grow up in peace. They like to raise their children in peace, and they like to say goodbye to this beautiful life in peace. Then why are we always preparing for war?

You're going to keep making these mistakes as long as you keep carrying your brain in the same scabbard with your sword, Lelldorin.

Honor LostAmbulant sunshine piercedthe soot covered glass ~the feeble man wandered byin this ritual morning pass ...

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem--a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o'-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts, no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.

We always think that God's presence is always provided to fix our problems but what if God's presence is more about fixing your perspectives? So that you will have a new way to see your problems. If you didn't make your bed before leaving home this morning, no angel is going to make your bed for you, it is still going to be as you left it till you come back.

War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

I didn't get to God by effort or title, I got there by invitation. God can lift you quickly if you let Him. He really cares.

War is a big word; it’s cruel, it’s hard, nobody wants that. Protecting yourself sounds much better. Putting up walls, shutting everyone out. And forgetting that those who you are so afraid of—they’re not all that different from you.

War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.

It's the anonymity of the war that makes the killing possible. When the nameless dead are named again on tombstone and on cenotaph, then they regain the identity they lost as soldiers, and take their place in grief and memory, the ghosts of sons and lovers.

Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.

Instead he felt only love. And that was the miracle. The surge in hatred since the war began had created more love around it. It was indomitable, mad, and everlasting, scattered through the rich and the poor, deep and calm in the Quakers, hot and fierce in the mothers, faithful in the warriors, wistful in the pets, seeping its way into mercy and atrocity, destroying things, rebuilding them.

Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. your life?

It is nearly impossible.''Nearly impossible and impossible are not the same thing.

Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.

The agenda of the Media is not to inform you, they don't care about you, they are trying to show you the truth. There are some intelligent Christians but they can't find them and put on the air ...for instance me

There are five dangerous faults which may affect a general:(1) Recklessness, which leads to destruction;(2) cowardice, which leads to capture;(3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;(4) a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame;(5) over-solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.

Old Ways May Not Give You UpAn elderly man in a Lobi village once renounced the spirits in favor of Islam by discarding the very beliefs in spirits and mystical inanimate objects that have held our societies together for more three centuries. He threw his fetishes in a nearby lake. Sadly he turned and walked away from the lake and the traditions. As the elder walked away, the fetishes leaped out of the lake onto his back again to reclaim him.“Sometimes the old ways will not give you up”…Chief–Lobi Tribe

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.

A big sacrifice is coming, and you won't have the courage to make it. That will cost you dearly. It will cost the world dearly.

This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.

Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?

For all those who say its a Man world. Respect Women Its their World we are just guest here

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.

As suddenly the whole world would slip back into a mollifying, untormented dark; their aching bodies knew its calm.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

Girls in love will do desperate and creative things.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

Every solider believes in war till the time he actually fights it.

Bad peoples often hunts past un-resolve haunted projection in other people's life and great peoples forgives haunted instinct nature of bad peoples let go and save the society but this war cycle will never ends. Human forgiveness will have limit.

I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.

I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.

The hard truths are the ones to hold tight. - Old Bear

Rewards for good service should not be deferred a single day.

We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.

Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality ...though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.

Didn’t young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?

There shall be confusion also in many places, and the fire shall be oft sent out again, and the wild beasts shall change their places, and menstruate women shall bring forth monsters:

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars ...

Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions—political, economic,psychological, military—that aims at the overthrow of the establishedauthority in a country and its replacement by another regime.