1984 War Quotes

The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that is exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from t ~ George Orwell

Pike and I aren't at war. We never were.
We are what's left over after the battle's already been lost on both sides.
We're not soldiers.
We're carnage. ~ T.M. Frazier

For the sake of peace, religious beliefs must never be allowed to be abused in the cause of violence and war. ~ Pope Francis

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us
mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him fro ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil. ~ Alain De Botton

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on. ~ Kevin Powers

Little brother, I don't mean to be a downer, but we're talking about War here. There's no way to mitigate damages. He won't let us. I was there with twenty-five Chthonians to fight him and he spanked our hides like we were Lemurian slave women. Two of us had our hearts ripped out and shoved down our throats while he laughed, then he licked the blood clean from his fingers and came at the rest of us. (Savitar) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

But say a man does know. He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all came about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it's as plain as the shining sun - the don't-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can't see it. ~ Carson McCullers

Some individuals may perceive their losing fight with gravity as a sharp pain in their back, others as the unflattering contour of their body, others as constant fatigue, yet others as an unrelentingly threatening environment. Those over forty may call it old age. And yet all these signals may be pointing to a single problem so prominent in their own structure, as well as others, that it has been ignored: they are off balance, they are at war with gravity. ~ Ida Rolf

The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte. ~ Rabih Alameddine

As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength. ~ George Orwell

A central problem with the idea that wars are needed to combat evil is that there is nothing more evil than war. War causes more suffering and death than anything war can be used to combat. ~ David Swanson

Answer: They war loving, they love laughing, they laugh weeping, they weep smelling, they smell smiling, they smile hating, they hate thinking, they think feeling, they feel tempting, they tempt daring, they dare waiting, they wait taking, they take thanking, they thank seeking, (...) ~ James Joyce

History offers examples of winning in diplomacy after losing in war. ~ Shigeru Yoshida

Guerrilla war is a test of wills. Obama's actual objectives - rollback in Iraq, containment in Syria - are not unreasonable. But they require commitment and determination. In other words, will. You can't just make one speech declaring war, then disappear and go fundraising. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Pacifists lead a lonely life. Not even gathering together can take the place of that vast, warm sun of approval that is shed on motherhood, on law-abiding, on killing, and on making money. Someday will we come into our own? Well, motherhood may move into the shade. Law-abiding is going through a trauma. But killing and making money are good for a long, long time. ~ Josephine Winslow Johnson

Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built. ~ Abraham Lincoln

When a man hunted an animal, whatever its status, the hunt took the form of an extended duel, a contest of strength, skill and cunning between man and beast. In the course of a hunt, Zahariel would grow to know his adversary intimately. In contrast, war was an impersonal affair.

As he charged towards the enemy fortress beside his fellow knights, Zahariel realised that he could be struck dead on the battlefield without ever knowing the identity of his killer. ~ Mitchel Scanlon

My fingers clutch the wooden edges of the podium. "My sister, Isabelle, was a woman of great passions," I say quietly at first. "Everything she did, she did full speed ahead, no brakes. When she was little, we worried about her constantly. She was always running away from boarding schools and convents and finishing school, sneaking out of windows and onto trains. I thought she was reckless and irresponsible and almost too beautiful to look at. And during the war, she used that against me. She told me that she was running off to Paris to have an affair, and I believed her. ~ Kristin Hannah

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy. ~ Erich Fromm

It is necessary to understand that war is common, strife is customary, and all things happen because of strife and necessity. ~ Heraclitus

Mum has always been a huge anti-war activist. She would go off to protest and get arrested. I have her passion, but it is not for politics. I am much more interested in psychology. It's more my job and my natural inclination. ~ Joan Cusack

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.' ~ Jesse Ventura

At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot. ~ Jules Renard

War I abhor, and yet how sweet The sound along the marching street Of drum and fife, and I forget Wet eyes of widows, and forget Broken old mothers, and the whole Dark butchery without a soul. ~ Seneca The Younger

The nation that would to-day disarm its soldiers and turn its people to the paths of peace would accomplish more to its building up than by all the war taxes wrong from its hostile and
unwilling serfs ~ Clarence Darrow

By taking out a loan, I am committing myself to years of interest repayments, and therefore to years of wage slavery. And the U.K. has been borrowing like crazy since 1694, when the Bank of England was invented. This means that we are locked into high taxation to pay for 300 years of wars and other costly and generally disastrous state enterprises. ~ Tom Hodgkinson

The mad, cruel, and accursed American war. ~ Lord George Gordon

He has entertained the thought that his neighbours like having one of him in the district, having their own Englishman, although he will insist that he is as South African as they are. But perhaps his presence is more in the nature of a provocation, and his actions: he pretends ignorance but he knows what those spindly pink and white flowers mean to men who still punish themselves with every detail of their war, picking at it like the scab of the miniature Union Jack in the middle of the flag. ~ Claire Robertson

In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons. ~ Herodotus

The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right ... " or "you have no right to ... " They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. ~ Simone Weil

I listen, perhaps the way the wounded will listen to the continuing war ~ Tory Dent

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go."
"The War Poems ~ Siegfried Sassoon

People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture. ~ Jacque Fresco

Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of scripture is more accurate than God's literal words. Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery - you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal (which, admittedly, sounds strange to say) because the most straightforward reading of scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. ~ Sam Harris

What a mother sings to the cradle goes all the way down to the coffin. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

My dear Excellency! I have not gone to war to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose. ~ Manfred Von Richthofen

There's no way in which you can ever win a war against terror. As long as there are conditions in many parts of the world that make people desperate: poverty, disease, ignorance, etc. I hope that we will discover soon, that we can survive, only together. We can prosper only together. And I think people are beginning to realize this, that you can't have pockets of prosperity in one part of the world and huge deserts of poverty and deprivation and think you can have a stable, secure world. ~ Desmond Tutu

On the flat expanse of pancake ice, War stood by the Pale Rider's side. Though their forms did not touch, their shadows intertwined, black on black, in a smoky caress.
"Knew you'd come," Death said cheerfully.
She smiled, and that slow motion of her lips hinted at many things. "The White Rider divided, and the world on the brink of destruction. How could I stay away?"
"I could set my watch by you."
"You don't have a watch." Her smile broadened into a grin. "An hourglass, maybe . . ."
"Please, not another joke about a scythe . . ."
She mimed zipping her mouth shut.
A pause, as they listened to the sounds of the boy healing and the man summoning doom.
"I like him," War said.
Even though she hadn't specified whether she meant the boy or the man, Death smiled and nodded. "Me too."
"You like everyone."
"Well, yes."
The two shared a quiet laugh, their voices mingling in perfect harmony.
A longer pause, and then War asked, "What of Famine?"
"What of her? She's not mine. Not yet, anyway. She will be soon enough."
The Red Rider slid him a look. "That's cold, even for you."
"Eh, just practical." A shrug. "Everyone comes to me eventually. It's the journey that makes it interesting."
"Such a people person!"
He flashed her a grin. "My best quality."
"Oh," said War, sliding her gloved hand into his pale one, "I can think of others that are better. ~ Jackie Morse Kessler

The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other. ~ Kristin Hannah

I considered the prevention of war as the test of our security policy; in addition to being able to rapidly and forcefully end any war forced upon us. ~ Yitzhak Rabin