10,941 Quotes About War

As for the new world war that's waiting in the womb of time, a healthily developed foetus, who can say what will spark it, how destructive it will be? We've already played at this war in film and fiction, indicating that there's a part of us that desperately wants it. What nonsense writers and filmmakers talk when they say that their terrible visions are meant as a warning. [...] It's sheer wish fulfillment. War... is a culture pattern. It's a legitimate mode of cultural transmission....

Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?

...'you have to ask yourself though, who are we to stop a war?’I sigh, wishing that the glittering pinpricks above us were truly stars. It was rare to see any due to the endless cloud cover. ‘Who are we not to?’ I say, to no one in particular. If we weren’t willing to try, then what did that say about us? I try to ignore the pessimistic voice eating away at my thoughts. Change could start with a few, but real change needed thousands.

Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out.

The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.

War is the worst way of gathering knowledge about a foreign culture.

And a ton came down on a coloured road,And a ton came down on a gaol,And a ton came down on a freckled girl,And a ton on the black canal,And a ton came down on a hospital,And a ton on a manuscript,And a ton shot up through the dome of a church,And a ton roared down to the crypt.And a ton danced over the Thames and filledA thousand panes with stars,And the splinters leapt on the Surrey shoreTo the tune of a thousand scars.

It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door.