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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The Nazis, for him, are merely available movie tropes--articulate monsters with a talent for sadism. By making the Americans cruel, too, he escapes the customary division of good and evil along national lines, but he escapes any sense of moral accountability as well. In a Tarantino war, everyone commits atrocities. Like all the director's work after 'Jackie Brown,' the movie is pure sensation. It's disconnected from feeling, and an eerie blankness--it's too shallow to be called nihilism--undermines even the best scenes.
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There's no nobility with war. It's tear-'em-up destruction that leaves you frustrated, bitter and angry... If you really knew what it was like for an hour, you wouldn't want anyone to go through it.
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Wait, I got it. We, uh, won the battle and lost the war, or was it the other way around? 'Cause around here, it's hard to tell sometimes.
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I seem to vaguely remember a time when America had confidence. And guts. And soldiers fighting a war didn't need to be given "permission" to defend themselves from enemies trying to kill them.
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When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
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The allure of military life and its heroic promise seem indestructible, but nothing threatens the romance of war more effectively than war itself.
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It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
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One interesting thing I found was that if you take an affluent modern society and collapse it during a crisis, like a war or a natural disaster, people begin relating in a more ancient, organic way. They're functioning in small interdependent groups and putting others first. And another irony is that even in terrible times, cooperating makes people feel good.
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We have got to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. … And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington-even with Truman at the reins of it all.
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I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories.
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In this era of non-judgmental mush, too many Americans have become incapable of facing the brutal reality of unprovoked hatred, based on envy, resentment and ultimately on a vicious urge to lash out against others for the pain of ones own insignificance. That has been a common thread in things as disparate as ghetto riots, two world wars, and now Islamic terrorism.
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An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immediate call for revolutionary action.
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Fight, gentlemen of England! fight, bold yeomen! Draw, archers, draw your arrows to the head! Spur your proud horses hard, and ride in blood; Amaze the welkin with your broken staves!
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There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself--the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.
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The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society - cars kill more than wars do.
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When we were children, we often played war. We had a fine collection of lead soldiers. My brothers would take different countries: Xavier had Italy; Pierre, Germany. Or they would swap around. Well, I, gentlemen, always had France.
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A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.
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For a strong adversary (corps) the opposition of twenty-four squadrons and twelve guns ought not to have appeared very serious, but in war the psychological factors are often decisive. An adversary who feels inferior is in reality so.
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Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.
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I made a mistake. I underestimated the influence of Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the rest of the neocons; I vastly underestimated their disingenuousness and incompetence. So George W. Bush went to war again, and just the way the neocons wanted him to- without significant international backing.
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I know the GOP is called the stupid party, but the idea that Republicans can have the Confederate flag hung around their neck is ridiculous! It's a Democrat flag! The flags - states that seceded during the Civil War were all Democrat states. That's their flag. The slave states were Democrat states! The racist states until the 1960s were Democrat states!
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As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union. It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?
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I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.
