War Quotes
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Leave nothing to the uncertainty of procuring a warlike apparatus at the moment of public danger.
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Driver had his own rules of war, and he tried to teach them to me. You know, when you clean a weapon the first rule is always clear the chamber. Not Driver. His first rule was always check to make sure it’s your weapon, so you don’t end up cleaning somebody else’s weapon.
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It is always easy to begin a war, but very difficult to stop one.
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Now therefore, be it Resolved by the Fiftieth Annual Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, That we hereby declare that we are unalterably opposed to any program which would entail the surrender of any part of the sovereignty of the United States of America in favor of a world government.
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If America cannot win a war in a week, it begins negotiating with itself.
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When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.
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Spielberg's film portrays Oscar as a hero of this century. That is not true. Neither he nor I were heroes. We were just what we were able to be. In war we are all souls without a destiny.
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Atomic war is bad but you know what’s even worse? Having had enough atomic wars that you can rank them in terms of horribleness.
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War toys are scary. They have a rocket launcher with a bayonet attached, in case you miss.
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It is a war of religion as much as a war for power.
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If we are perceived by the rest of the world as employing a double standard in the way that we pursue the war on terror, if we are seen as imposing on other countries' nationals, burdens that we wouldn't be able to tolerate ourselves, then we sacrifice the legitimacy of the enterprise. And I don't think the world considers it illegitimate for the United States to seek to protect itself from another attack like the one we suffered on 9/11, but I think the world does think it is illegitimate to do so by sacrificing their citizens' rights and not our citizens' rights.
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As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.
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War, if reason prevails, is waged to obtain a better peace than that which existed prior to the hostilities.
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In war, the moral element and public opinion are half the battle.
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I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.
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Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad.
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We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.
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After the war, in which I served as a pilot in the Air Force, I took up films.
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You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.
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You have to go to war with a sword and a shield. You cannot go to war with bare hands.
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It’s often described as a cool war that we are entering – I would say it is feeling exceptionally chilly at the moment.
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In the seed and the soil, we find the answers to every one of the crises we face. The crises of violence and war. The crises of hunger and disease. The crisis of the destruction of democracy.
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It's not just the war itself. It's what you do after the war and what structure you put in place and how you make that structure work.
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It is an approved maxim in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for this reason alone, that he desires it.
