Bosnia Serb War Quotes

War creates murderers and profiteers. Wherever there is conflict you'll find a man ready to torture, rape and kill in the name of The Cause and to line his pocket with a quick easy buck. ~ Ken Scott

There's probably one more story about Bosnia that I'd like to do, because I spent a fair amount of time on the Serb side of the lines, which isn't apparent in the other books. ~ Joe Sacco

In this city, the victors had delusions of grandeur. It was visual. Across the street from the hotel stood City Hall, sporting an oversized Serb flag that hung from the roof to the ground, a hundred feet tall, fifty feet wide, three horizontal stripes of blue, white and red, so large that only a strong breeze could make it flap. The flag, hanging over a building where, fifty years earlier, Kurt Waldheim worked as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, was meant as a projection of Serb nationalism, as though size were all that mattered, rather than content. I had never thought of flags as weapons, but in Bosnia, as in the rest of Europe, they were becoming the deadliest weapons of all.

p. 80 ~ Peter Maass

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha'i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn't want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and sometimes their lives. ~ Salman Rushdie

Her mother, an employee with a state-owned company, is a Serb. Her father, an engineer, is a Muslim, which means that S. is neither one nor the other. That is why S. thinks she is exempt from alignment. This is what she believed until the armed men and soldiers arrived in her mountain village that same day. Now, however, she sees that for her war began the moment others started dividing and labelling her, when nobody asked her anything any more. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. ~ Michel Foucault

Quickness is the essence of the war. ~ Sun Tzu

There will come a time in your life when you lose something that matters to you. You'll fight for it and you won't win. But what really matters isn't the war you're waging, it's that you don't lose the person you are in the midst of the battle. ~ J. Sterling

The NFL has gone a long way to Disney-fy its image, but it's not Disney. It's the MMA. It's a violent, brutal human war, with rules. The same guy who says, 'I'm going to rob everybody,' is the same guy who would be successful in the NFL. ~ Terry Crews

You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education. ~ Henry Giroux

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits ~ H.L. Mencken

Sports is like a war without the killing. ~ Ted Turner

I have served one idea, marched under one banner - war against all imposed authority - against every kind of deprivation of freedom, in the name of the absolute independence of the individual. ~ Alexander Herzen

War for the sake of war is sin, but war for the sake of defense is duty. ~ Martin Luther

We have no desire to continue a sanctions war, trading blows. ~ Sergei Lavrov

American farmers, by making the commitment to grow more corn for ethanol, are at the top of the spear on the war against terrorism. ~ James Woolsey

War is wicked, beause it is murder and hate. And it is foolish, because hate and murder can only destroy people's bodies, not change their minds. ~ Margaret Deland

By understanding and increasing just this one capacity of the human brain, an enormous amount of social change can be fostered. Failure to understand and cultivate empathy, however, could lead to a society in which no one would want to live - a cold, violent, chaotic, and terrifying war of all against all. This destructive type of culture has appeared repeatedly in various times and places in human history and still reigns in some parts of the world. And it's a culture that we could be inadvertently developing throughout America if we do not address current trends in child rearing, education, economic inequality, and our core values. ~ Bruce D. Perry

These Are Not The Droids You Are Looking For. ~ George Lucas

Governments predicate the call for war upon very terrible lies: that it will restrain evil men, make honest and courageous men out of boys, and the outcome depends upon the moral virtuousness of the combatants. Warfare is obscene, an evil waste of life, and a destroyer of civilization. Society can salvage no virtue or rectitude from the larger waste of destroying cities and killing people. There is no moral message deduced from warfare. All warfare is barbaric and inhuman. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war. ~ Wes Craven

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible. ~ Jeannette Rankin

After every 'victory' you have more enemies. ~ Jeanette Winterson

It is a terrible thing," Beocca said to me. "War, it is an awful thing."
I said nothing. I thought it was glorious and wonderful.
"The shield wall is where men die," Beocca said, and he kissed the wooden cross that hung about his neck. "The gates of heaven and hell will be jostling with souls before this day is done," he went on gloomily. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were. ~ Tony Hillerman

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. ~ Terry Eagleton

My mother never gave in. One of Father's friends had once said that if Mother had been in charge, the Great War would have been over by 1916. Father had replied that if my mother had been in charge, she would have made damn sure the bloody thing hadn't started in the first place. Mother always said it wasn't just about keeping going, but about standing up for what you believed in as well. ~ A.J. Pearce

I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place. ~ Gary Paulsen

But as much as this is a soldier's reason d'etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about 'killing'. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by any number of other euphemisms. In precise and technical military parlance, reflecting the ever more precise and technically removed means of killing, the 'enemy' becomes the 'target'. But for the soldiers who personally 'engage' these 'targets', these objects are colloquially 'slotted', 'dropped', 'hit', 'fragged', 'sawn in half', 'smashed' or just plain 'shot'.
Then the soldier will have achieved the noun of a 'kill'.
The author's supposition is that such words are used by the soldier in combat as an attempt to mentally dissociate himself from the reality of his actions, so he can continue to operate as a soldier - and perhaps, when all is finally said and done, as a human being back home. ~ Jake Wood

To befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business & corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The president is commander-in-chief of the army and navy and of the state militia when called into the service of the United States. He holds this power in time of peace as well as in time of war. ~ Charles A. Beard

In Montana, where Sen. William Andrews Clark made his fortune and lost his reputation, people had assumed that all his children were long dead. After all, he was born in 1839 and was of age to serve in the Civil War. ~ Bill Dedman

A fundamental reason why Britain was not torn apart by civil war after 1688 was that its inhabitants' aggression was channelled so regularly and so remorsely into war and imperial expansion abroad. ~ Linda Colley

The drama can only be brought to its climax in one of two ways
through the selective brutality of terrorism or the impartial horrors of war. ~ Kenneth Kaunda

We made love on the living room floor with the noise in the background of a televised war and in that defeaning pleasure i thought i heard someone say if we walk away they'll walk away ~ Conor Oberst

Care for him who shall have borne the battle ~ Abraham Lincoln

Now, you should admit it: you are here engaged in some military action directed against the Yuuzhan Vong, knowing full well that any action you take could embroil the people of this peaceful world in your destructive war."
"Isn't destructive war kind of redundant? Until I see a constructive war, or even a giggly war, I have to think so."
Mudlath & Han ~ Aaron Allston