10,941 Quotes About War

It is a cliché, and a bad one, that generals try to “fight the last war” – that is, do what worked the last time out. That does not give them enough credit. Rather they tend to fight the war they would like to fight or the one they expected to fight. But neither of those responses is usually sufficient. The foremost task of a general is to understand the nature of the war he or she faces – which often turns out to be a third way, neither the one preferred nor the one expected.

A person who pays you good when you do him evil is neither weak nor good, he is practicing an atypical kind of warfare

The same rationale applied to the Red Army: there was almost no limit to the number of lives that the Stalinist regime was willing to expend to achieve its goals. That was the logic of a system built on revolutionary imperatives: the individual counted for nothing. In western armies strategic decisions were generally reached by calculating the gains to be made by a manoeuvre against the likely cost in casualties. In the Red Army no such calculations were ever really made.

There are no atheist in foxholes, kids.

Before the war, Warsaw was a wonderful place to be Jewish. Life was very much like it is here in America, where a Jew is free to be a Jew.

A little thought can save a lot of lives. (pg. 162)

- as battle stations wilt like flowers tossed into flame, as radio bands crackle triumph and swiftskimmers swoop after fleeting void tails, as guns speak their last arguments into mute space, she slips away.

Why?” Kusha used to ask Rashad, and she’d always get the same answer: “The unevolved kind brings chaos and wars.

... I may question the infallibility of the teachers, but I hope that I shall not therefore be accused of doubt as to the thing to be taught.