War is big business. It’s a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war – for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.
The history of mankind is a history of war.
When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.
The forest restoration campaign is a war to ameliorate nature.
Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. There may be legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not… with regard to abortion and euthanasia.
War remains the decisive human failure.
I’m trying to raise the awareness of the troops that, when they deploy and go to war, it’s not just them at war – it’s also their family. Their family is having to go through all the hardships and the stresses.
War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.
I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.
Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
In many parts of the world, especially Pakistan and Afghanistan, terrorism, war and conflict stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering.
The war we are fighting today against terrorism is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war – diplomacy, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and of course, military power – and we are developing new tools as we go along.
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
The war on drugs has made government more powerful, citizens less free, and hasn’t helped users or addicts.
War is a blessing compared with national degradation.
War is not only a matter of equipment, artillery, group troops or air force; it is largely a matter of spirit, or morale.
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming – a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy.
Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It’s not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it’s madness.
Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.
We’ve waged war on work. We have collectively agreed, stupidly, that work is the enemy.
I’ve always been at war with myself, for right or wrong. I don’t know how to explain it more. It’s universal. Some people are better at dealing with it, and they sleep with no pain – not pain, arguments. I’ve grown quite comfortable with being at war.
Gladio had been necessary during the days of the Cold War but, in view of the collapse of the East Block, Italy would suggest to Nato that the organisation was no longer necessary.
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America – not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures… I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with ‘Once upon a time.’
I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours.
My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.
Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.
An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn’t there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.
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.
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war’s dislocation.
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
I’m not ambitious. I don’t want to get anywhere, I don’t want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don’t want anything. I don’t want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.
Study and work and work and study will keep in active exercise both the physical and mental. These two, rightly conducted, will not war against each other.
The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.
The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we’d probably go to war.
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.
Regardless of what one’s attitude towards prohibition may be, temperance is something against which, at a time of war, no reasonable protest can be made.
I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.
War’s stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first; you have to talk last anyway.
In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Accursed be he that first invented war.
War is never a lasting solution for any problem.
For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.
Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.
For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.
Business is a combination of war and sport.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.
Surviving is the only glory in war.
