Fighting War Quotes

You think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

Why does anyone fight a war? To protect a way of life, to find or support loved ones. To avenge those lost. Or maybe because it's a calling. Because someone has to. Because there's a line no enemy should be allowed to cross. ~ Tracy Banghart

You seem happy enough," came Monza's voice, "for a man about to risk his life."

Shiver's opened his eyes and turned his grin on her. "I've made peace with myself."

"Good for you. That's the hardest war of all to win."

"Didn't say I won. Just stopped fighting."

"I'm starting to think that's the only victory worth a shit," she muttered, almost to herself. ~ Joe Abercrombie

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. ~ Smedley Butler

Wars have always been easier to fight than explain. ~ Marty Rubin

The Cold War isn't thawing; it is burning with a deadly heat. Communism isn't sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting. ~ Richard M. Nixon

Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting? ~ Edward Snowden

Both his voice and eyes had the burning cold of alcohol. His strength no longer lay in his military experience or his knowledge of the map, but in his harsh, impetuous soul. ~ Vasily Grossman

It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. What happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans fled twice from the ghetto ... My life's dream has come true. Defense in the ghetto has become a fact. Armed Jewish resistance and revenge are actually happening. I have witnessed the glorious and heroic combat of the Jewish fighters. ~ Mordechai Anielewicz

If fighting is sure to result in victory, than you must fight, even though the ruler forbid it; if fighting will not result in victory, then you must not fight even at the ruler's bidding. ~ Sun Tzu

He thought with all these men dead fighting war, it must be that war was winning. ~ Robert Olmstead

Sometimes battles are unavoidable. ~ Shannon A. Thompson

Nine g's is good, if the pilot can stand it. We couldn't stand it. Not in the airplanes of World War II. ~ Adolf Galland

We live in hope that the good we do here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. We also hope to win the war. We hope that right and goodness will triumph, and that when the war is won, we shall have a better world. And we work toward that end. We buy war bonds and put out incendiaries and knit stockings---"

And pumpkin-colored scarves, Polly thought.

"---and volunteer to take in evacuated children and work in hospitals and drive ambulances" - here Alf grinned and nudged Eileen sharply in the ribs - "and man anti-aircraft guns. We join the Home Guard and the ATS and the Civil Defence, but we cannot know whether the scrap metal we collect, the letter we write to a solider, the vegetables we grow, will turn out in the end to have helped win the war or not. We act in faith.

"But the vital thing is that we act. We do not rely on hope alone, thought hope is our bulwark, our light through dark days and darker nights. We also work, and fight, and endure, and it does not matter whether the part we play is large or small. The reason that God marks the fall of the sparrow is that he knows that it is as important to the world as the bulldog or the wolf. We all, all must do 'our bit'. For it is through our deeds that the war will be won, through our kindness and devotion and courage that we make that better world for which we long. ~ Connie Willis

practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive. It ~ George Orwell

Who told you you couldn't come back when you're grown? Was it the same person who told you grown-ups don't cry or blush or clap their hands when they're happy? Don't try to say otherwise, I've seen you fighting like a boxer to change your face so that it never shows anything. Whoever told you that's what growing up means is a villain, as true as a mustache. I am growing up, too, and look at me! I cry and I blush and I live in Fairyland always! ~ Catherynne M Valente

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home. ~ Victoria Secunda

The chief problem is, of course, whether the marching of the general spirit of things is heading consciously or sub- consciously toward an idea of extension of boundaries. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth. ~ Paul Johnson

You weren't designed to cure RM, but you did it anyway. You weren't designed to cross the toxic wasteland, but you did that too, and then you escaped from I don't know how many bad guys, and crossed through the middle of a war zone, and while every other group of weary, bloodied refugees is getting smaller and smaller, yours is getting bigger. You're teaching people, and you're recruiting people, and it's not because you were built that way, or because you had some kind of glorious destiny to fulfill, but because you're you. You're Kira Walker. You're not going to save the world because you're the chosen one, you're going to save it because you want to save it, and nobody in this world works harder for what they want than you do. ~ Dan Wells

We Americans" is a fabrication of the rulers. There are the tens and tens and tens of millions of workers and farmers in the United States; we are part of a "we" with our class brothers and sisters throughout the world. There is a "they": the tiny handful of propertied families in whose interests the imperialist United States government acts at home and abroad. It is "they," their state, that "we" must overthrow in order to end imperialism's inexorable advance toward deepening crisis, violence, brutality, and devastation - toward fascism and world war. ~ Jack Barnes

Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers. ~ Elie Wiesel

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The ~ Tim Weiner

Kami launched herself at Holly, trying to hug her and hit her on the arm and let out a triumphant war cry all at once. She almost punched Holly in the chest but stopped herself at the last moment. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

I love you so much," I said, closing the distance between us and wrapping myself around him. "No matter what happens, no matter how this war turns out - I love you, forever and always. ~ Aimee Carter

For war there is always enough. It's peace that's expensive. ~ Joseph Heller

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation. ~ Camille Paglia

No one finds war. War finds them ~ Trotsky

Length of service: one year or duration of war. Duration of war, of course. He didn't want to spend a whole year in the army. ~ Louisa Young

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Her youngest daughter shrugged. "Ain't got no money, do we?" "I don't understand. Why aren't you pillaging like the rest of your kin?" "It was the Northlands, Da. Ain't nothin' to pillage but the crows in the trees." "And snow," their eldest added. "Lots and lots of snow." Bram motioned to his study. "You know where I keep the gold coin." As if on fire, their offspring made a desperate run for their father's study, climbing over the table and fighting each other through the door. It wasn't pretty. ~ G.A. Aiken

Attempting to express his gratitude to the men of Easy Company, he pondered, 'What is my attachment to men such as yourself, whom I have never met? Is it respect because you put your own life on the line to ensure younger people like me have the world we live in today? Is it awe that you could live from day to day watching friends being gunned down or blown apart and still get up the next day prepared to face the same horrors? Or perhaps, fascination at how you and your comrades were able to return to relative normality after the war, with the ghosts of the dead watching what you made of the life they were denied? ~ Dick Winters

Anyway, there were more after the war than before. ~ Hutton Gibson

The assertion that 'culture' explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parent cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. ~ John Tooby

There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word. ~ Ernst Haeckel

People make excuses [for not wanting to fight me]. It has a lot to do with my style. I'm a crafty fighter but I can also punch. ~ Erislandy Lara

From outside the shelter came children's voices. The shrill squeals brought the excitement of their unseen game into the opaque quiet of Setsuko's world and made her smile. "No war can go on forever. And human beings are the toughest creatures on earth, you know. There's no sense in being in a hurry to die. You MUST LIVE, whatever happens." Shoichi Wakui had squeezed her hand and told her this with an almost violent urgency, though his grasp was weak and his voice halting. Were those the Sugiwaras' children she could hear? The barber had had the presence of mind to rescue his kit when he fled through the flames of his burning shop, and now he was doing a brisk trade, seating his customers on cushions atop piled stones from the foundations. To house his family he'd put a lean-to against the railway embankment, barely enough to keep out the weather, but at least the children were no longer starving. Even in defeat the locally garrisoned soldiers all had some supplies of food, and while waiting to board trains for their hometowns from Yokohama Station they'd sit on the stone seat of the Sugawara Barbershop and have a good shave, leaving the children something to eat as payment.
Setsuko no longer felt the rage that had overwhelmed her at the disbanding ceremony. If they had fought on home ground, one hundred million Japanese sworn to die before they would surrender, those children would have had to die too. Those young lives and spirits would have been extinguished in terror ~ Shizuko Gō

War is much too serious a thing to be left to military men. ~ Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

So why had he come? He'd said he'd had no choice, but for centuries men had chopped off their own limbs, faked insanity, gone into hiding or to prison rather than to war. Was there some dark flaw in his psyche? Did he have some perverse need to destroy? To kill? ~ Dominique Wilson

For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. ~ Annie Jacobsen

Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor. ~ Steven Pressfield

World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years. ~ Ken Follett

My parents said sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you. But I always felt a sense of exhilaration after a fight; it was the names that really hurt me. ~ Michael Franti

Fight fairly. Give generously. Laugh loudly. Love deeply. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

History did not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter of necessity; WHICH men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents. ~ Joseph Heller

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. ~ Guy Sajer

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad. ~ Gary Paulsen

We are trying to prevent a third world war. ~ Harry S. Truman

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Hockey is the only place where a guy can go nowadays and watch two white guys fight. ~ Frank Deford

Behind every effect there is a cause. You can never eliminate an effect without first understanding its cause. ~ Suzy Kassem

The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Don't think about it. Think, and your actions will betray your thoughts. Don't feel bloodlust. Keep a calm heart. Move forward. ~ Mohiro Kitoh

On paper, in the colonel's lamp-lit office, when we saw a problem it was easy to fix; all we had to do was direct that corps commanders regulate their columns so as not to delay each other, halting until crossroads were clear, keeping their riles well closed, and so forth. It didn't work that way on the ground, which was neither flat nor clean - nor, as it turned out, dry ~ Shelby Foote

It wasn't something I started off in my teens or early twenties thinking I want to be a war correspondent. I still don't think of myself as a war correspondent. I'm not. I'm a foreign correspondent. ~ Stephen Farrell

As long as the peace-makers are armed with assault rifles, it's highly unlikely we'll ever have peace. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

It doesn't hurt me on a personal level, but it hurts me on a larger level of like, why are people so stupid? Why do we have to go through these unnecessary exercises. Fight crime, don't fight me. If you really want to make a difference don't fight me or Fugazi. ~ Ian MacKaye

The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity. ~ George Grosz

The war made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times. ~ Joseph Goebbels

The end is important in all things. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Everything was handed to me - looks, fame, wealth, honour, love. I rarely had to fight for anything ~ Elizabeth Taylor