10,941 Quotes About War

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us.

Violence, of course, is generally associated with frankly totalitarian forms of anti-political utopianism like Communism, but the Second World War shows that liberal universalists are as capable of violence as Communists. They are just less capable of honesty.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.'Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

All societies that maintain armies maintain the belief that some things are more valuable than life itself.

It's the time to run away an' hide under the bed, an' hope the world's still in one piece when you come out again.

Nonviolence simply cannot defend property rights over human rights.

The route had been renamed after the war, Sergeant Booth had told them in the taxi. Now it was known as the Road of Remembrance. To Billy, recalling Alf Dawkins with his crutches and his nervous tick, begging for half-crowns, it seemed more a case of how quickly people forgot.

On these forgotten islands they rest, and the sand packs tight around them while their friends have gone on to other islands, to die on other beaches. The little invasions, the crumbs of global warfare, eventually to be remembered only by mapmakers and mothers.

Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red.