Quotes about war

708 quotes · 239 authors

Quotes

  1. He understood the phenomenon, of how almost dying made you appreciate what life had to offer. And it was a potent drug, that feeling. Battle was not glorious. But surviving it? That was.

  2. War had a way of making carpe diem seem valid no matter what you wanted to seize...

  3. The loudest sound on a battle field was click! when you were expecting bang! It was a never-ending wonder: What was going to go wrong next?

  4. Never felt so alive as you did after you came out of a battle in one piece. And if you were dead? You wouldn’t feel that...

  5. Truth is the first casualty in war, but communications is the second.

  6. “We won’t necessarily become extinct. Disarmament is being negotiated. Not all of us are insane.”

    “But most of you are. Enough of you are—it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.

    p. 152

  7. “Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”

    For a moment Bryce did not speak. Then he said, “But it was human beings who painted the pictures, made the statues.”

    “Only a few human beings,” Newton said. “Only a few.”

    p. 159

  8. "Looking at things this way," she said, comparing the left and right side of the chronology, "we Japanese seem to live from war to war."

  9. I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.

  10. When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It's just something you have to do. Otherwise you're the one who gets killed." Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata's chest. "Bang!" he said. "Human history in a nutshell."

  11. There’s no war that will end all wars.

  12. "The only hope you have is to get her to an American hospital?" Cummings asked, repeating what Izzy had just said. Izzy started to answer. The cell phone went dead. "Izzy?" Cummings said. "Izzy?" How did moments of decency occur in this war? "Izzy," Cummings said. "Bring your daughter here." That was how.

    p. 169