Survivors Of War Quotes

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars ... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history. ~ Zainab Salbi

You must control your emotions. You must control your feelings. If there is any fear or insecurity, you must destroy it before it destroys you. It is not the size or the strength of your opponent that matters. These can be measured. It is what cannot be measured ... courage, determination ... that count. ~ Anthony Horowitz

But on Kwajalein, the guards sought to deprive them of something that had sustained them even as all else had been lost: dignity. This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected. ~ Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Working with women survivors of war has taught me that we need to listen to women's perspectives on war in order to understand how to effectively rebuild a country, a community and a family. ~ Zainab Salbi

The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever. ~ Anthony Doerr

She could see the tempest in his eyes, swarming in the blue of them with a kind of primal violence that made the breath catch in her throat and her pulse pound in response.

"I need you." His fingers dived into her hair, dragging it back from her face, fisting again. "You can't know what kind of need is in me for you. There are times, do you understand me, I don't want it. I don't want this raging inside me. It won't stop."

His mouth crushed down on hers, and she tasted that need, the fierce and focused intensity of it. And the greed, the desperation of it.

She gave herself over to it without hesitation. Because he was wrong, as he was very rarely wrong. She understood the need, and she understood the frustration of knowing it wouldn't be controlled.

The same war waged in her. ~ J.D. Robb

The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. ~ Carl Jung

I'm serious. I've got to get people to realize that the government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that's not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration ... When I run - if I run - we're going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people. ~ Charles Barkley

We're taught that domestic life is not a "serious" political topic, like war and peace, but the fact is that we spend most of our lives doing everyday things: at the dinner table, in the kitchen, washing dishes, grocery-shopping, commuting. These things make up the fabric of our lives. ~ Annia Ciezadlo

learned that knowledge is power. If you want to control people's lives, limit their knowledge. That is why, throughout history, despots have burned books and exiled (and even killed) those with knowledge who threatened their power. Before the Civil War in America, it was against the law in many states to teach slaves to read and write. Knowledge is the most powerful force on earth. That is why the control of knowledge is essential to the control of power. The formula is: Information x Education = Knowledge Knowledge is power - and lack of knowledge is weakness. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

Once or twice, at night, he planted himself in front of the type-writer, trying to get back to the book he'd come to New York to write. It was supposed to be about America, and freedom, and the kinship of time to pain, but in order to write about these things, he'd needed experience. Well, be careful what you wish for. For now all he seemed capable of producing was a string of sentences starting, Here was William. Here was William's courage, for example. And here was William's sadness, smallness of stature, size of hands. Here was his laugh in a dark movie theater, his unpunk love of the films of Woody Allen, not for any of the obvious ways they flattered his sensibility, but for something he called their tragic sense, which he compared to Chekhov's (whom Mercer knew he had not read). Here was the way he never asked Mercer about his work; the way he never talked about his own and yet seemed to carry it with him just beneath the skin; the way his skin looked in the sodium light from outside with the light off, with clothes off, in silver rain; the way he embodied qualities Mercer wanted to have, but without ruining them by wanting to have them; the way his genius overflowed its vessel, running off into the drain; the unfinished self-portrait; the hint of some trauma in his past, like the war a shell-shocked town never talks about; his terrible taste in friends; his complete lack of discipline; the inborn incapacity for certain basic things that made you want to mother him, fuc ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears. ~ Chris Womersley

The end of the Cold War removed the immediate causes of whole destruction but not the threat contained in our knowledge. We must tame this knowledge with the ideals of justice, caring, and compassion summoned from our common human spiritual and moral heritage, if we are to live in peace and serenity in the twenty-first century. ~ Mahnaz Afkhami

It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual. ~ Lauren Groff

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

The uncritically admiring supporters and friends of the prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], in whose ranks I certainly don't include David [Brooks], but include Charles Krauthammer, the columnist, and Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, insist on comparing him to the incomparable leader of the British forces in country in part of - during World War II. ~ Mark Shields

What we once used as weapons of war, we now use as weapons against fish. ~ Sylvia Earle

Anyone who believes that the eternal question of war and peace in Europe is no longer there risks being deeply mistaken. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

Why should this war in the West be fought for the restoration of Poland? The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again. ~ Adolf Hitler

Christ, dealing with you is like rewriting The fucking Art of War,' he grumbled... ~ C.C. Gibbs

When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards-some sort of climate Nuremberg. ~ David Roberts

War," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet. ~ Darren Shan

What does it matter who is ruler of a realm that no longer exists? ~ Krishna Udayasankar

May I just single out for salutations, on the 'anti-war' side: Pop Stars For Appeasement, Dancers Against Democracy, Actors For Apathy, Fashionistas For Fascism and Jugglers For Genocide. All of them united under that flaccid flag of convenience, Show-Offs For Saddam. ~ Julie Burchill

The Lebanese government has officially recognized the Armenian genocide, but nowhere is there any official memorial to the victims of the World War I famine. ~ Louis Farshee

You," he continued, grabbing my wrist. "All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself you can cheat death, and you are absolutely offended when you learn that you can't. You sat in your nice little flat all through our war and watched us, bleeding all over the TV news. And you thought, 'How awful!' and then you got up and made yourself another cup of gourmet coffee. ~ Geraldine Brooks

There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle - the human heart is content when distracted by war.

"The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerk ~ Jaroslav Kalfar

Behind the world's most difficult problems are people - groups of people who don't get along together. You can blame crime, war, drugs, greed, poverty, capitalism or the collective unconscious. The bottom line is that people cause our problems. ~ Zaid Hassan

Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices. ~ Rodrigue Tremblay

The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. ~ George W. Bush

The old lady told me that all the girls in the village of Annezin prayed every night for the War to end, and for the English to go away - as soon as their money was spent. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it. ~ Robert Graves

The shock of collision was like the smashing of boulders in the landslide at Nesson. Damen felt the familiar battering shudder, the sudden shift in scale as the panorama of the charge was abruptly replaced by the slam of muscle against metal, of horse and man impacting at speed. Nothing could be heard over the crashing, the roars of men, both sides warping and threatening to rupture, regular lines and upright banners replaced by a heaving, struggling mass. Horses slipped, then regained their footing; others fell, slashed or speared through. ~ C.S. Pacat

The oppression of a majority is detestable and odious; the oppression of a minority is only by one degree less detestable and odious. ~ William E. Gladstone

People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled. ~ Norman Mailer

You can't uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete ... Ronald Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete. ~ Mark Steyn

Seal the borders
of my body to pain,
seal my eyes, mouth, belly
to any hunger not
my own.

I rename myself
America. No love
no grief in the world but mine. ~ Shailja Patel

The butter was real of course. Daddy had a fetish about using only real butter. As he handed it to me, I noticed the hue was brash and yellow, almost like the artificial color used in the making of cheap Margarine. The boysenberry preserves were recently purchased. The glass had a bright red foil label with intricate embossed wording and as I turned the lid, I heard the sucking sound of the seal breaking. Daddy looked over, concerned, until I carefully laid the jar of jam on the counter, pushing it toward him. "I can do everything Tweetie Bird," he said to me. I smiled, embarrassed at my old nickname from when I was a child and nodded my head. ~ ~Theresa Griffin Kennedy~

The central thesis of the American failure in Afghanistan - the one you'll hear from politicians and pundits and even scholars - was succinctly propounded by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage: 'The war in Iraq drained resources from Afghanistan before things were under control'. ~ Anand Gopal

Investigative superstar Jason Leopold spares no one, least of all himself, in this devastatingly accurate first-hand exposé. News Junkie provides the best account so far of how, and why, current American journalism has become so pharisaical, spineless, and detached from the truth ~ T.D. Allman

Kate! Get some ice on that ankle or it's going to swell to the size of Luke's head. Then neither of you will be able to get through the front door. ~ Violet Cross

Most of the oppression of Muslims in the world right now is carried out by other Muslims. ~ Salman Rushdie

Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark ... In the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon's: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. ~ Carl Schmitt

The women of Afghanistan, left behind as their men fought, did what the women of World War II did - used their wits and resourcefulness to preserve some semblance of civilization. ~ Tina Brown

He'd imagined peacetime would bring him a sense of belonging. During the war it kept him going, that thought of peace. He'd believed in it like a season he knew it would arrive one day ~ Amanda Hodgkinson

We had seen too many horrors already, and we could see and hear more explosions all around us as the war continued, very close to our hiding place; machine gun fire and the sounds of grenades – all very frightening. ~ Alfred Nestor

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians. ~ John Hersey

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. Lofty goals such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds. In all eras, across time and culture, only war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power have fulfilled that funding requirement. Today, the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in nonarchitectural undertakings, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

What I call stupidity is not only lack of knowledge, although much of humanity could be elevated from poverty, dogma, illusions and war through traditional education. A thriving education system is the foundation for progress. But stupidity is not merely ignorance; it can also be a way of acting. If you act contrary to your own goals in life – you're stupid. ~ Gudjon Bergmann