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"To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given."
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"In war, when a commander becomes so bereft of reason and perspective that he fails to understand the dependence of arms on Divine guidance, he no longer deserves victory."
"In war there is no prize for runner-up."
"Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training."
"That's the attractive thing about war, said Rosewater. "Absolutely everybody gets a little something."
"Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."
"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."
"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."
"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."
"In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem."
"Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly."
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