Quotes about war

As visible symbols, soldiers often receive praise or condemnation, and both reactions feel curiously undeserved.

They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits.

War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway.

There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.

For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.

As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.

Money was the crux. Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to 14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself.

It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition so not war at all really but something more pathological.

Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.