10,941 Quotes About War

Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.

[К]огда сегодня ставится вопрос о цене победы, он правомерен. Не надо только полагать, как многие почему-то полагают, что это обесценивание войны. Это рядовой может рассуждать — нам нужна одна победа, мы за ценой не постоим. А генерал (и чем выше генерал, тем в большей степени) так рассуждать не имеет права. Потому что он жертвует не своими жизнями.

[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.

You think there are no idiots in the intelligence business, that your superiors are all brilliant men who understand the game? [...] This business is rife with idiots. They play with lives and they play badly, and when people like you die as a result, they shrug and as 'Risks have to be taken in wartime.' You'd really march yourself into a firing squad for that kind of fool?

Military intervention cannot liberate women because it is embedded within a set of assumptions, beliefs, and social relations that reinforce and reproduce gender inequality, as well as other social inequalities within and across nation-states. Military intervention depends upon a belief in the legitimacy of armed violence in resolving political problems, which in turn depends upon our adherence to particular ideas about what it means to be a man or a woman.

To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.

We negotiated peace with them the first time, my girl, because we were in a position of strength. That's how wars work, that's how truces work. We show them we've got more power than they imagine and they're more willing to make peace.