Syrian War Quotes

At times it seems as if the whole world has become a refugee and the few of us, who are privileged enough to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock instead of a siren, those of us who are enveloped by a veil of safety many of us fail to appreciate, have become desensitised to the migrating numbers, to the images of the dead, shrugging them away as a collective misery that this ailing part of the world must endure. ~ Aysha Taryam

Refugees are not like you and me. They are you and me. That terrible river of the wretched and damned flowing through Europe is my family. And there is no time in the future in which they might be helped. The only time we have is now. ~ Richard Flanagan

The most important thing is our dignity. If we have that we can survive on bread and water. ~ Richard Flanagan

According to the international organization for migration, more than 1 million migrants have arrived in Europe this year, the most since World War II. Half of them were Syrian. ~ Lawrence O'Donnell

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war ... This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry. ~ Benjamin Franklin

It is of the greatest important in this world that a man should know himself, and the measure of his own strength and means; and he who knows that he has not a genius for fighting must learn how to govern by the arts of peace. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

THE THING WAS AN EXPERT IN HORROR, BUT THIS HUMAN HORROR INDEED EXCEEDED ANY OTHER POSSIBLE FATE. NOT ONLY BECAUSE IT WAS WITHOUT MERCY, BUT BECAUSE IT WAS ACTED UPON RATIONALLY AND WITHOUT COMPULSION. IT WAS A CHOICE. THE KILLING WAS UNRELATED TO THE LARGE WAR, AND IT SERVED NO OTHER PURPOSE THEN EVIL. MEN CHOSE TO DO THIS TO OTHER MEN AND INVENTED REASONS AND PLACES AND MYTHS IN ORDER TO SATISFY THEIR DESIRE IN A LOGICAL AND METHODICAL WAY. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Ah! Books don't come all that often, at least not my way. Andre Malraux's The Psychology of Art was one of them. It was published just after the war. It was too expensive to buy but I located a copy of this luminous book in the Manchester Art Gallery; and i had to make several journeys by motor-cycle, often through sleet and snow until I had finished it. From time to time I wanted to get up on the table to proclaim its truth to all around me, or slap my next-desk neighbour over the back and say, 'There you are; just get hold of that!' Once I nearly did but just in time I noticed he was reading a text on the structure of plastics. By now, of course, I know that some people can get as much aesthetic pleasure out of contemplating the formula for a long molecule as others do from beholding a mural by Piero della Francesca. Technologists have their Ah! Moments too! ~ Vernon Sproxton

There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to you sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there's a fire or a war?
And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it's scary and unpredictable, but it's REAL. It's possible.
-Mackie Doyle, The Replacement ~ Brenna Yovanoff

Long hair will make thee look dreafully to thine enemies, and manly to thy
friends: it is, in peace, an ornament; in war, a strong helmet; it ...
deadens the leaden thump of a bullet: in winter, it is a warm nightcap; in summer,
a cooling fan of feathers. ~ Thomas Dekker

A couple of weeks after I telephoned my old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, I really did go to see him. That must have been in 1964 or so - whatever the last year was for the New York World's Fair. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground. ~ Buddha

We have been waiting for an hour when we see a squad of German soldiers line up on the roadbed alongside the train. Next comes a column of people in civilian clothes. Surely they are Jews. All of them are rather well dressed, with suitcases in their hands as if departing peacefully on vacation. They climb aboard the train while a sergeant major keeps them moving along, "Schnell, schnell." There are men and women of all ages, even children. Among them I see one of my former students, Jeanine Crémieux. She got married in 1941 and had a baby last spring. She is holding the infant in her left arm and a suitcase in her right hand. The first step is very high above the rocky roadbed. She puts the suitcase on the step and holds on with one hand to the doorjamb, but she can't quite hoist herself up. The sergeant major comes running, hollers, and kicks her in the rear. Losing her balance, she screams as her baby falls to the ground, a pathetic little white wailing heap. I will never know if it was hurt, because my friends pulled me back and grabbed my hand just as I was about to shoot.

Today I know what hate is, real hate, and I swear to myself that these acts will be paid for. ~ Lucie Aubrac

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Make love and not war! 'Cause we don't need no trouble.
What we need is love
To guide and protect us on.
If you hope good down from above,
Help the weak if you are strong now. ~ Bob Marley

Jihad - God's lawful war against nonbelievers. To drive the point home, the ambassador left Jefferson and Adams with a final image of what American sailors would face on the high ~ Glenn Beck

I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don't like the war? Let's blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don't like ecological disregard? Let's blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don't like being poor and socially immobile? Let's blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about.

The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it's impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes. ~ Peter Joseph

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement ~ James Madison

Chicago. It's insane and violent and corrupt and vital and artistic and noble and cruel and wonderful. It's full of greed and hope and hate and desire and excitement and pain and happiness. The air sings with screams and laughter, with sirens, with angry shouts, with gunshots, with music. It's an impossible city, at war with itself, every horrible and wonderful thing blending together to create something terrifying and lovely and utterly unique. I ~ Jim Butcher

The economy of gift, of art, is fundamentally opposed to the economy of war. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of everyone. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. ~ William James

The commies are the only people on earth who think Star Wars will work. If they're that gullible, maybe we should have held the summit at Atlantic City and let them lose all their missiles playing Keno. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

War was a democracy, he knew. The enemy got a vote too. ~ Christopher G. Nuttall

Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1856 ... I preferred the success of a candidate whose election would prevent or postpone secession, to seeing the country plunged into a war the end of which no man could foretell. With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slave States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years ... I therefore voted for James Buchanan as President. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

Before the war, a white man named Jonathan Edwards came to Stockbridge to teach my people about sin, but I doubt very much he could see sin in this. You defended yourself against a man who would otherwise have killed you and your friends. Perhaps you feel no regret because your spirit knows you did what was right. ~ Pamela Clare

Societies that preach hate are where people no longer know how to live. - On Hate Hour ~ Lamine Pearlheart

It's true--I can see it now--we are made of where we've come from, molded by landscape, weather, harbors, hunger, and war, as much as by individual ancestors. The experience of the place--its struggles, strife, and horrors--accrues, even if we haven't personally experienced it. We are, still, its inevitable consequence. ~ Deborah Tall

And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven. Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin. ~ Ron Chernow

War hurts. It hurts no matter which sides the bombs are falling on. ~ Eddie Vedder

The halberd is inferior to the spear on the battlefield. With the spear you can take the initiative, the halberd is defensive. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. ~ Milan Kundera

I'd single-handedly go to war and burn their whole organization to the ground before I ever let them harm what was mine. And there were no two ways about it- Brighton would always be mine. ~ A. Zavarelli

There were many good years. Good decades, good centuries. We believed we were living in paradise. Perhaps that was our downfall. We wanted our lives to be perfect, so we ignored imperfections. Problems were magnified through inattention and war might have become inevitable if the Bore hadn't ever made. ~ Robert Jordan

One may know how to conquer without being able to do it. ~ Sun Tzu

Gabriel thought maps should be banned. They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it did not possess.
'An Ice-cream War ~ William Boyd

People are deceived and drawn on step by step, till war, death and destruction are upon them. ~ William T. Sherman

In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims? ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

I don't write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents. ~ Suzanne Collins

On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. ~ Thomas Merton

It's not the drug that causes the junkie it's the laws that causes the junkie because of course the drug laws means that he can't go and get help because he is afraid of being arrested. He also can't have a normal life because the war on drugs has made drugs so expensive and has made drug contracts unenforceable which means they can only be enforced through criminal violence.

It becomes so profitable to sell drugs to addicts that the drug dealers have every incentive to get people addicted by offering free samples and to concentrate their drug to the highest possible dose to provoke the greatest amount of addiction as possible.

Overall it is a completely staggering and completely satanic human calamity. It is the new gulag and in some ways much more brutal than the soviet gulag. In the soviet gulags there was not a huge prison rape problem and in this situation your life could be destroyed through no fault of your own through sometimes, no involvement of your own and the people who end up in the drug culture are walled off and separated as a whole and thrown into this demonic, incredibly dangerous, underworld were the quality of the drugs can't be verified. Were contracts can't be enforced except through breaking peoples kneecaps and the price of drugs would often led them to a life of crime.

People say "well, I became a drug addict and I lost my house, family, and my job and all that." It's not because you became a drug addict but, because t ~ Stefan Molyneux

They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place. ~ Svetlana Alexievich

It has cost me years of thought to arrive at certain results, by many believed to be unattainable, for which there are now numerous claimants, and the number of these is rapidly increasing, like that of the colonels in the South after the war. ~ Nikola Tesla

Sure, the disease- the inner illness- kills. nevertheless, it's the symptoms - right?- which disfigure, which denude, which scrofulate and scar and maim. it hurts, we say, but we don't care a howl about it; we never cared about it before the pain came, only until the pain came, only because the pain came (perhaps that's why we have to suffer now); and we don't care about it today. we care about the presence of our feeling. period. we want it gone. soonest. make the pain go away doc; rub the spots out; make the quarreling stop; let the war end. peace is the death we rest in under that stone that says so. [...] peace is everybody's favourite teddy, peace is splendiferous, and it's not simply the habit of the sandy-nosed. it's the "get well" word. but after all, without a symptom, what do we see? without an outbreak of anger or impatience, what do we feel? without a heart-warming war, would we ever know or care or concern ourselves with what was wrong? the trouble is that the wrong we care for is soon the war itself, the family wrangle, the bellyache, the coated tongue, the blurry eyes, the fever-ah- the fever in the fevertube. ~ William H. Gass

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.
There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination
they produce more hues than can ever been seen.
There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted. ~ Sun Tzu

As a sea is full of drops of liquid, I was but one in the ocean of War
Many are swept ruthlessly into the battering, bashing waves, and only few survive to swim to shore ~ Jade Kosche

that war is war, and not popularity seeking."40 ~ Wesley Moody

At the beginning God said: "Let there be light," and light was, and light is, and light shall be. So Christianity is rolling on, and it is going to warm all nations, and all nations are to bask in its light. Men may shut the window-blinds so they cannot see it, or they may smoke the pipe of speculation until they are shadowed under their own vaporing; but the Lord God is a sun! ~ Thomas De Witt Talmage

The function and Navy in any future war will be to support the dominant air arm. ~ Jimmy Doolittle

You will always find that those are most apt to boast of national merit, who have little or not merit of their own to depend on ... ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Guy of Gisborne: "I understand the king is winning, thanks be to God."

Robin Hood: "He's killing more people."

Gisborne: "Is that not winning?"

Robin: "Show me an argument ever settled with bloodshed, and then I'll call it winning. ~ BBC Robin Hood