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War Quotes
"If there is no sufficient reason for war, the war party will make war on one pretext, then invent another... after the war is on."
21
"The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud."
21
"And he said that he didn't want to have a war or anything like that again."
20
"I glance at my boots. They are big and clumsy, the breeches are tucked into them, and standing up one looks well-built and powerful in those great drainpipes. But when we go bathing and strip, suddenly we have slender legs again and slight shoulders. We are no longer soldiers but little more than boys; no one would believe that we could carry packs. It is a strange moment when we stand naked; then we become civilians, and almost feel ourselves to be so. When bathing Franz Kemmerich looked as slight and frail as a child. There he lies now - buy why? The whole world ought to pass by this bed and say: 'That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn't want to die. Let him not die!"
20
"We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war."
20
"As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war."
20
"The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces."
20
"And this system sorted out the Chechen war in just 20 days. This way, I used the President's power, he didn't use me. It wasn't hard for me to leave - it isn't my scene. I have nothing to do there."
20
"Every country we conquer feeds us. And these are just a few of the good things we'll have when this war is over. Slaves working for us everywhere while we sit back with a fork in our hands and a whip on our knees."
20
"I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."
20
"As to my Title, I know not yet whether it will be honourable or dishonourable, the issue of the War must Settle it. Perhaps our Congress will be Exalted on a high Gallows."
20
"When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac."
20
"War is being declared tomorrow here so perhaps you can understand that I have been working under difficulties, but difficulties negligible compared with what others have to go through."
20
"There was a war crimes trial because an American prisoner had been shot trying to escape. He had obviously been recaptured and shot, and that violated the Geneva Convention."
19
"The worst thing about this war is the chance it gives these dreadful little persons, the chance to make themselves important."
19
"We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?"
19
"The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office."
19
"The first two Prime Ministers whom I served, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher drew strikingly different lessons from the Second World War."
19
"More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam."
19
"And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all."
19
"How very like humans to pervert a message of love and peace to make it into an ideology of war and oppression to serve their own ends."
19
"I sincerely wish war was a pleasanter and easier business than it is but it does not admit of holidays."
19
"War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves."
19
"War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary."
19
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