War Quotes - Page 57

I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE...AND BEG EVERYONE...TO BE A HERO... AND SAVE THE YAZIDI NATION

War made the state, and the state made war

You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it!

War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.

He was just a small church parson when thetwar broke out, and heLooked and dressed and acted like all parsonstthat we see.He wore the cleric's broadcloth and he hookedthis vest behind.But he had a man's religion and he had a stongtman's mind.And he heard the call to duty, and he quit histchurch and went.And he bravely tramped right with 'em every-twhere the boys were sent.He put aside his broadcloth and he put thetkhaki on;Said he'd come to be a soldier and was goingtto live like one.Then he'd refereed the prize fights that the boystpulled off at night,And if no one else was handy he'd put on thetgloves and fight.He wasn't there a fortnight ere he saw the sol-tdiers' needs,And he said: "I'm done with preaching; thistis now the time for deeds."He learned the sound of shrapnel, he could telltthe size of shellFrom the shriek it make above him, and he knewtjust where it fell.In the front line trench he laboured, and he knewtthe feel of mud,And he didn't run from danger and he wasn'ttscared of blood.He wrote letters for the wounded, and he cheeredtthem with his jokes,And he never made a visit without passing round the smokes.Then one day a bullet got him, as he knelt be-tside a ladWho was "going west" right speedy, and theytboth seemed mighty glad,'Cause he held the boy's hand tighter, and he tsmiled and whispered low,"Now you needn't fear the journey; over theretwith you I'll go."And they both passed out together, arm in armtI think they went.He had kept his vow to follow everywhere thetboys were sent.

I am asked if I think the war was a just war ... how can I answer? I was a boy born and raised in beautiful Leningrad, a boy who loved his parents and went obediently to school. A boy who was yanked out of that life and dumped in a strange land where life followed different rules.

Let us also acknowledge that the hearts which suffer the most from our wars are those of mothers. Their vital voices have been left out of the political equation for too long. An Iraqi or American mother cries the same as an Israeli or Afghan mother. The eyes of a mother who has suffered the loss of a child can destroy the soul of anyone who gazes upon them. More souls become casualties of war than physical bodies.

With a savage grin, he let out an inhuman roar of bloodlust and threw himself into an unholy orgy of blood, fangs, claws, and death.

Why don't we like them?" Katalin asked. "Because they don't treat us right." After Zoltán said it, he marveled at the realization that in trying to clarify years of abuses and lists of grievances, that in trying to make oppression understandable for a child, he had reduced the horror of Soviet domination to one simple, honest statement of fact: The Russians didn't treat the Hungarians right.

No one starts a war warning that those involved will lose their innocence - that children will definitely die and be forever lost as a result of the conflict; that the war will not end for generations and generations, even after cease-fires have been declared and peace treaties have been signed. No one starts a war that way, but they should. It would at least be fair warning and an honest admission: even a good war - if there is such a thing - will kill anyone old enough to die.

You don't spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.

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.

Give me a book and I may change the world, give me a weapon and there will be no world to change.

Long before something happens in our life, it happened in our heart.

It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts - for democracy.

Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand...

It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years

Sir, you do understand that - officially - I'm not actually a centurion. I haven't even been assigned to a legion yet.'tThe general continued writing as he spoke. 'What was the name?'t'Corbulo, sir.'t'Corbulo, you have an officer's tunic and an officer's helmet; and you completed full officer training did you not?'tCassius nodded. He could easily recall every accursed test and drill. Though he'd excelled in the cerebral disciplines and somehow survived the endless marches and swims, he had rated poorly with sword in hand and had been repeatedly described as "lacking natural leadership ability." The academy's senior centurion had seemed quite relieved when the letter from the Service arrived. t 'I did, sir, but it was felt I would be more suited to intelligence work than the legions, I really would prefer -' t'And you did take an oath? To Rome, the Army and the Emperor?'t'I did, sir, and of course I am happy to serve but -'tThe General finished the orders. He rolled the sheet up roughly and handed it to Cassius. t'Dismissed.'t'Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I just have one final question.'tThe General was on his way back to his chair. He turned around and fixed Cassius with an impatient stare. t'Sir - how should I present myself to the troops? In terms of rank I mean.' t'They will assume you are a centurion, and I can see no practical reason whatsoever to disabuse them of that view.

You ought to welcome troubled-souls with your peaceful-spirit.

As long as man is alive, he will always deem himself to be the light of the world, and consider his enemies as the darkness. And they will be thinking like that on both sides of the front.

Never mind of what your enemy thinks of you, relax and think a head of him.

That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.

A [national] flag has no real significance for peaceful uses.

That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

I know this is war, but the rest of us are trying to pretend it's a party.

Some people are disappointed in their life because they are trying to use the tools that God did not authorised them to use in their life, trying to build on a purpose that is not even attached in their personality.

Fear could break a line faster than any enemy charge.

In my view, any government whose state is perpetually at war, and remains so in spite of initiatives to make peace, is incompetent and unfit and should resign.

Examples of goodness that know no ethnic, religious, racial, or political bounds are important documents of war, as they also represent an axis around which a healthy future can be constructed after the atrocities have halted.

They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!

Ez for war I call it murder - There you hev it plain and flat I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment for that.

Bombs and bullets don't discriminate.

The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings.

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.

You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.

Yet if he had been asked… if he were happy… He would have admitted readily enough that he was uncomfortable, that he was cold, and badly fed, and venomous; that his clothes were in rags, and his feet and knees and elbows raw and bleeding through much walking and crawling; that he was in ever-present peril of life, and that he really did not expect to survive the adventure he was about to thrust himself into voluntarily, but all this had nothing to do with happiness: that was something he never stopped to think about.

The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter... With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it- uncomfortably- every second we were at war. But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us... war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.

Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.

One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.

It was uncanny. You press a button and a man drops dead a hundred meters away. It seemed hollow and remote, falsifying everything. It was a trick of the lenses. The man is an accurate picture. Then he is upside down. Then he is right side up. You shoot at a series of images conveyed to you through a metal tube. The force of a death should be enormous but how can you know what kind of man you’ve killed or who was the braver and stronger if you have to peer through layers of glass that deliver the image but obscure the meaning of the act? War has a conscience or it’s ordinary murder.

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet.Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them.Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet?In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing.Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room.And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.

Peace surfaced here. Hard to imagine a person finding peace through war, but no one finds peace in war—peace finds you. It crawls into your sleeping bag and helps you fall asleep, nudges your arm, tells you to turn over, think about home.

It's too bad war makes peopledisappear like chess pieces, and that prisonsturn prisoners into movie endings.

I believe that to be kept from evil is better than to be healed from sickness.

The human society has evolved war as a cultural institution, like the science of astronomy, or mathematics. War is a part of our lives, a career, a respected vocation. Bright, alert young men and women move into it, putting their shoulders to the wheel as they did in the time of Nebuchadnezzar. It has always been so.

What do you know of sacrifice? Need I tell you of York's dead . . . of Sandal Castle? My brother did survive the battle, his first. He was seventeen and he entreated them to spare his life. They cut his throat. Their heads were then impaled on York's Micklegate Bar to please the House of Lancaster, to please a harlot and a madman. She had my father's head crowned with straw and she left a spike between the two. . . . That one, she said, was for York's other son.

Guy of Gisborne: “I understand the king is winning, thanks be to God.” Robin Hood: “He’s killing more people.”Gisborne: “Is that not winning?”Robin: “Show me an argument ever settled with bloodshed, and then I’ll call it winning.

3. War Peace & Action - 3B.02 LOVE & PEACEHatred goes not by hatred,Violence not by violence,Disappear hatred and violence,By love, understanding, non-violence.[241]t- 3B

Escapers were the cream of the crop.

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.

Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together.

In ticking off the things that weren’t done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin—so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, “the closest squeak and the greatest victory.

Thus looked at from outside, these guests --in this dead-and-alive dining room, of this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town--in grey, dead winter of the deadliest part of the most deadly war in history--thus seen from a detached point of view, they presented an extraordinary spectacle.

An extreme fearfulness moves through all your body, and your mind is troubled more.

Kill someone on the behalf of yourself, you get deemed a murderer. Kill someone on behalf of your Government, you get deemed a hero.

War is a terrible, bloody thing.

We do not recognize that we are addicted to some negative psychological habit, some terribly self-destructive patterns of thinking...

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.