Quotes about warfare

Warren Eyster - The Goblins of Eros

A heroic, losing battle! I'm tired of brave men who die. There's nothing pretty about losing.

B.H. Liddell Hart - The Revolution in Warfare

In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in s

Jayden Hunter - Undressed To The Nines

I do have nightmares. So what? I wouldn’t trade places with any of the f**kers I killed. Am I afraid of Hell? No. I’ve been. It’s worse than advertised but not as bad as imagined. ~ Brandon Hull

John M. Sheehan -

Its spiritual revolution time; warrior up and let's get some for the Kingdom and slay them giants of sin and shame, marching upward for God is with us! Push Through church, push through!

Bruce E. Johansen -

Individuals are told to reduce our "carbon footprint," and we should. But how many years of riding a bike to work would it take me to offset one F-15 flying for an hour?

T.H. White - The Candle in the Wind

He had conquered murder only to be faced with war. There were no laws for that.

Herman Melville -

War yet shall be, but warriors are now operatives; war's made less grand than peace.

Unknown -

All warfare is based on deception.

Charles Krauthammer -

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

Laurie J. Marks - Fire Logic

...how impossible itis to really make a choice, when the best choice of all is an option youcouldn’t even imagine.

Daniel McHugh - The Mirror and the Maelstrom

(Evil people) do not believe in forgiveness. Their transgressions are either punished or not punished. That is the only result that matters.

Daniel McHugh - The Mirror and the Maelstrom

A man without equals is a dangerous man indeed. He must exercise the most difficult of attributes, restraint.

Daniel McHugh - The Mirror and the Maelstrom

Why all this death?You might as easily ask ‘Why all this life?’.

Daniel McHugh - The Mirror and the Maelstrom

Those of strong character and training are chosen by fate. They cannot help but rise to the forefront when their nations are troubled.

Jim George -

Spiritual warfare is the unseen battle God wages on your behalf.

Frans de Waal - Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

James Lee Burke - Creole Belle

As a revolutionary people, we Americans won a probable victory over the best and biggest army in the world because we learned to fight from the Indians. You can do a lot of damage with a Kentucky rifle from behind a tree. You don't put on a peaked hat and a red coat and white leggings and crossed white bandoleers with a big silver buckle in the center of the X and march uphill into a line of Howitzers loaded with chain and chopped horseshoes.

Wayne Gerard Trotman - Veterans of the Psychic Wars

Lovers and warriors are not bound by the rules of fair play.

Victor Davis Hanson - Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous adva

Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

War is a soul-shattering experience for the innocent.

Kim Zetter - Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

The nations, of course, that are most at risk of a destructive digital attack are the ones with the greatest connectivity. Marcus Ranum, one of the early innovators of the computer firewall, called Stuxnet 'a stone thrown by people who live in a glass house'.

Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

Mike Klepper -

Legal action is but warfare disguised.

Auliq Ice -

When your enemy is tough make your actions rough, you will meet at the same point.

Auliq Ice -

Never mind of what your enemy thinks of you, relax and think a head of him.

Daniel Abraham -

Waiting for a battle was the hardest part. Unless you got a dagger in your gut during the battle. Then that was hardest. Or you got through just fine and saw your men dead around you. Then that was.

Alex London - Guardian

Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.

Richard Jordan Gatling -

It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.

Dominique Wilson - The Yellow Papers

So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill?

Lance Conrad - The Price of Loyalty

Anyone can act strategically, it doesn’t take much to make a plan. The skill of a general is his or her ability to react strategically when plans fail.

Carl von Clausewitz -

We maintain, on the contrary, that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase “with the addition of other means” because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs.

Sun Tzu - The Art of War

He wins his battles by making no mistakes.Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.

Michael Pitre - Fives and Twenty-Fives

Always I am speaking English on behalf of fools

Wayne Gerard Trotman - Veterans of the Psychic Wars

Verily, there is no dishonor in death at the hands of a far superior enemy.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana - N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

Religion makes people kill each other. Science supplies them with weapons.

B.H. Liddell Hart - The Revolution in Warfare

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfa

Miles Cameron - The Fell Sword

Victory in war is usually the result of compromising what you want and behaving like those you despise." - Tapio

Henry V. O'Neil - CHOP Line

Don't let 'em see they killed you!

Sandra Kopp - Warrior Queen of Ha-Ran-Fel

Do not let fear and anger conquer you. You must conquer them. If you don’t, you give your enemy all power over you, and you will never overcome him. Anger uncontrolled flames up fast and hot, and even though you direct this fire at your foe, it is you it burns. Hamiel

Peter Duysings - Turbulent Waters

Bullets do not discriminate. They are equal-opportunity projectiles.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

If we need help, we must cry to the Most High God.

Terry Hayes - I Am Pilgrim

In war, the first casualty is truth.

Edwin Markham -

Fight ever on: this earthly stuff If used God’s way will be enough. Face to the firing line o friendFight out life’s battle to the end. One soldier, when the fight was red,Threw down his broken sword and fled.Another snatched it, won the day, With what his comrade flung away.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

Praying is pleasing to God.

Aberjhani - The River of Winged Dreams

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

Only when we pray for one another, we will have peace.

K.W. Jeter -

That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.

Peter A. Lorge - The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb

Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.

Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince

In conclusion, the arms of others either fall from your back, or they weigh you down, or they bind you fast.

John Howard Yoder - When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking

Nonviolent action on behalf of justice is no automatic forumla with promise of success: but neither is war. After all, at least half of the people who go to war for some cause deemed worthy of it are defeated.

John Howard Yoder - When War is Unjust: Being Honest in Just-War Thinking

If the tradition which claims that war may be justified does not also admit that it could be unjustified, the affirmation is not morally serious. A Christian who prepares the case for a justified war without being equally prepared for hte negative case has not soberly weighted the prima facie presumption that any violence is wrong until the case for an exception has been made.

Elisabeth Hoemberg - Thy People My People

As politicians know all too well, even a Government that does not represent the wishes of a people can count on their support once the nation is locked in conflict with an external foe.

C. JoyBell C. -

They taught the women that the home is a shame and in doing so, they successfully decomposed nations. Instead of it being the greatest honour to build a family, it became a laughingstock. And in this becoming, they successfully deconstructed nations. They taught the men that loyalty is merely an option and in doing so, they successfully destroyed nations. Instead of it being the greatest pride to love one woman, it became a joke, a funny side comment. And in this becoming, they successfully pois

Barbara W. Tuchman - The Guns of August

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The warrior of the night knows the sacredness of warfare.

Richard C. Carrier - Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism

Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. lt is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Pers

Wilfred Owen - The Poems Of Wilfred Owen

As bronze may be much beautified by lying in the dark damp soil, so men who fade in dust of warfare fade fairer, and sorrow blooms their soul.

Lailah Gifty - Akita

With the grace of prayer, we shall prevail.

Plato - The Republic

....harmony that would fittingly imitate the utterances and accents of a brave man who is engaged in warfare or in any enforced business, and who, when he has failed […] confronts fortune with steadfast endurance and repels her strokes

Cormac McCarthy - Suttree

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

Sam Wazan - Trapped in Four Square Miles

The school remained open. I thanked Allah that the Americans operated differently. Had the Lebanese lost 241 men in one day, and had we the power and the reach, we would have American males hung from their testicles and set on fire. The frame of mind that dictates our actions quashes our ability to develop the power and reach exhibited by the Americans, I thought.

Pazaria Smith -

The power of the Blood of Jesus, the Word of God & the name of Jesus are the believers weapons of defense against the Devil.

Walter Scott - Ivanhoe

…having once seen him put forth his strength in battle, methinks I could know him again among a thousand warriors. He rushes into the fray as if he were summoned to a banquet. There is more than mere strength--there seems as if the whole soul and spirit of the champion were given to every blow which he deals upon his enemies. God assoilzie him of the sin of bloodshed! It is fearful, yet magnificent, to behold how the arm and heart of one man can triumph over hundreds.

Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

The missile crisis "was the most dangerous moment in human history," Arthur Schlesinger commented in October 2002 at a conference in Havana on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, attended by a number of those who witnessed it from within as it unfolded. Desision-makers at the time undoubtedly understood that the fate of the world was in their hands. Nevertheless, attendees at the conference may have been shocked by some of the revelations. They were informed that in October 1962 the world wa

Lois McMaster Bujold - Mirror Dance

Modern warfare wasn't supposed to have this much blood in it. The weapons were supposed to cook everyone neatly, like eggs in their shells. (Mark Vorkosigan's first experience with warfare, on seeing Miles Vorkosigan splattered before him)

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The holy war is only within.

Darrell Drake - A Star-Reckoner's Lot

Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.

Anurag Shourie - Half A Shadow

Every war has its martyrs — the unsung heroes who sometimes don’t even know the rationale behind the war they are fighting. They fight because they are trained to, kill because they are told to and die because they are destined to.

Winston Groom - Forrest Gump

At dawn, they call in a napalm airplane, but it drop the shit damn near right on top of us. Our own fellers be all signed and burnt up - come running out into the open, eyes big as biscuits, everybody cussing and sweating and scared, woods set on fire, damn near put the rain out!

Winston Groom - Forrest Gump

After a while, they start landing some relief in helicopters, and I guess the napalm bomb have frightened away the gooks. They must of figured that if we was willing to do that to ourselves, then what the hell would we of done to them? They taking the wounded out of there, when along come Sergeant Kranz, hair all singed off, clothes burnt up, looking like he just got shot out of a cannon.

Winston Groom - Forrest Gump

There was some people hurt far worst than I was in that hospital, let me tell you. Poor old boys with arms and legs and hands and who knows what else missing. Boys what had been shot in their stomach and chests and faces. At night the place sound like a torture chamber - them fellers be howling and crying and calling for their mamas.

Winston Groom - Forrest Gump

There was a guy next to my cot name of Dan, who had been blowed up inside a tank. He was all burnt and had tubes going in and out of him everyplace, but I never heard him holler. He talk real low and quiet, and after a day or so, him and me got to be friends. Dan came from the state of Connecticut, and he was a teacher of history when they grabbed him up and threw him into the Army. But because he was smart, they sent him to officer school and made him a lieutenant. Most of the lieutenants I kno

Winston Groom - Forrest Gump

Bullets an stuff be flying all over. It is something I simply cannot understand - why in hell is we doing all this, anyway? Playing football is one thing. But this, I do not know why. Goddamn.

John Keegan - A History of Warfare

[W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form.

Chögyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.

Sun Tzu - The Art of War

All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

Shatrujeet Nath - The Conspiracy at Meru

The outcome of battle is never in a warrior’s control. What is in his control is how he chooses to fight and what he chooses to fight for. Today, I choose to fight to keep the Anartas and Sindhuvarta free of the invaders – and I choose to fight such that the enemy will speak of me in their legends for generations to come.

Joe Reyes - Aftermath

When the bombs fell, it wasn't a war; it was an obliteration. No one had any idea who shot first or why.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

Condemning war has not curbed armed conflict. Religion and education did not eliminate war. Warfare did not terminate more wars. Armed combat simply breeds endless wars.

Kilroy J. Oldster - Dead Toad Scrolls

War provides some people with a sense of purposefulness. The drumbeat of war quickens the pulse of neighbors, relatives, tribes, and nations. Hostile nations amass weapons of destruction claiming that they seek peace through deterrence. When war comes, advocates of arms galvanize the citizenry by proclaiming the inevitability of conflict. Each side’s propaganda machine cast the campaign of present war as the next Great War. Generals brashly promote armed conflict as the war to end all other wars

T. Mountebank -

… as General Berringer would readily admit, “If you’re in a fair fight, I’ve done something wrong.

Aleksandra Layland -

If we go to war, it must only be with right on our side.

Steven Pressfield - Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That is all I know. That is all I can tell you.--Dienekes at Thermopylae

Lailah Gifty Akita -

The holy war is warfare.

Italo Calvino - Difficult Loves

...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

Derek Donais - MetalMagic: Talisman

His men had begun gathering the wounded or stunned into a small group some distance back up the slope. Here and there an animal or human stirred, but not many. There were few cries of pain or fear now. Mostly, it was eerily quiet. Even the insects had ceased their music.

James D. Sass - Essays in Satanism

The enemies of your enemies are not always your friends, but they can still be useful.

Wilfred Owen - The War Poems

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifle's rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries now for them; no prayers, nor bells,Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,The shrill demented choirs of wailing shells,And bugles calling for them from sad shires.What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes,Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls' brows shall

Robert E. Lee -

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.

James Jones - The Thin Red Line

All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

A life of prayer is a praise of being.

Lailah Gifty Akita -

Faithful prayer!

Dan Florence - Zombies Love Pizza

Sure we could replace war with paintball battles. But it would escalate to paint grenades, paint bombs, weapons of mass paint. I don’t want to live in a world where my kids have to worry about what color they will be in the morning.