Quotes about war

It was a dramatization of total chaos, a functional definition of confusion, an unchoreographed dance of sad violence. It was war.

Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them.

“War does not call for judgment,” I said, “merely survival.”

“Si, a lot of men make far greater sacrifices than he will. For the good of the country.”

“But he wouldn’t even be consulted about it!”

“Neither are they; they’re drafted into the army.”

“Well, maybe they should be asked, too.”

He genuinely didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s wrong to force a man to join an army and kill other people against his own wishes.”

They just looked at me. What I was saying was really incomprehensible to them.

In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that's left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.

War is chaos. It always has been. But technology makes it worse. It changes the fear. At the Institute, I feared men. I feared what Titus and the Jackal could do to me. You see death coming there and can at least struggle against it. Here, you don't have such luxury. Modern war is fearing the air, the shadows, fearing the silence. Death will come and I won't even see it.

I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn't. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical.

What you encountered was an abomination, a military intelligence. It was designed to be insidious and spiteful and inimical to life, and it wasn’t smart enough to have a conscience.

I was going to call it a mistake, but you could argue that there are no mistakes in war, only fortunate and less fortunate events.

Clavain had been a soldier. He had killed more people than he could remember, even though those days had been a long time ago. It was really a lot less difficult to do when you had a cause to believe in.

War does strange things to truth.

Were the ironies of taxation any better: raising money for schools and hospitals and roads and bridges, and spending it on blowing up schools and hospitals and roads and bridges in self-defeating wars?