The Soldier S Cross Quotes

God has arranged strange ways for some of us to find him. Sometimes He brings us on long physical journeys; sometimes He leaves us at home and makes the journey internal. Yours has been both. You have gone a long way and struggled a great deal, but I can see from your eyes that it was not for nothing. ~ Abigail J. Hartman

I am no king, and I am no lord,
And I am no soldier at-arms," said he.
"I'm none but a harper, and a very poor harper,
That am come hither to wed with ye."
"If you were a lord, you should be my lord,
And the same if you were a thief," said she.
"And if you are a harper, you shall be my harper,
For it makes no matter to me, to me,
For it makes no matter to me."
"But what if it prove that I am no harper?
That I lied for your love most monstrously?"
"Why, then I'll teach you to play and sing,
For I dearly love a good harp," said she. ~ Peter S. Beagle

In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty. ~ William Odom

They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. ~ Marilyn French

A leader must be ready to send the soldiers under his command to their deaths ~ Eric S. Nylund

There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring. ~ C.S. Lewis

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean. ~ William Faulkner

I'm tired of thinking about Agatha. Well, not about her, but about my loss of her. Today I went through some old boxes of mine and found some journal entries I wrote in the second grade. One was about the loss of a girl, the S name on my list, so I'll copy and paste it for posterity:

Today was a bad day. Stephany broke up with me for Tommy. I don't like that slimy Tommy. Tommy is a turtle. I used to like turtles but now I like warm blooded creetures. Maybe Stephany is a reptile disguised as a human jerkface. I won't cry because I am a soldier. Soldiers do not dispense tears. Soldiers kill their enemies. Tommy is my enemy. But the code of the moose says a warrior must eat what he kills. Does this mean I should have eaten my neighbors cat? I will not cry today or ever. I am fearless like my dad. My dad is a superhero. He is courageous and invisible. I haven't seen him in four years. When I see him next he'll probably tell me I am taller. Maybe I will tell him he is shorter. And fatter and balder. Maybe he will appear again and I can be normal. I would very much like to not wear wooden shoes anymore. Cats tongues are rough like sandpaper. Cats must never lick my shoes. Nobody licked my shoes the way Stephany did. I will miss her and her early-onset male pattern baldness. ~ Jarod Kintz

The U.S. Army cancelled an order for 600,000 black berets that were made in China. It's not just that they were made by slave laborers. It's that no soldier can feel good about himself wearing headgear from the Kathie Lee Collection. ~ Argus Hamilton

A leader is the man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do, and like it. ~ Harry S. Truman

Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out. ~ James S.A. Corey

We make a messed-up pair, don't we?"
"The soldier and the junkie," Daniel said with a self deprecating chuckle.
"Ex-soldier and ex-junkie," Sam corrected him. "We're getting there. ~ Isabelle Rowan

If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population ... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense. ~ Paul Stamets

They [U.S. soldiers] are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan. ~ Sarah Palin

The colored man has been accustomed all his life to lean on the white man, and if a good officer is placed over him, he will learn readily and make a good soldier. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

The highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is bearing arms. ~ George S. Patton

So, who are they really, these hundred thousand white supremacists? They're every white guy who believed that this land was his land, made for you and me. They're every down-on-his-luck guy who just wanted to live a decent life but got stepped on, every character in a Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard song, every cop, soldier, auto mechanic, steelworker, and construction worker in America's small towns who can't make ends meet and wonders why everyone else is getting a break except him. But instead of becoming Tom Joad, a left-leaning populist, they take a hard right turn, ultimately supporting the very people who have dispossessed them.

They're America's Everymen, whose pain at downward mobility and whose anger at what they see as an indifferent government have become twisted by a hate that tells them they are better than others, disfigured by a resentment so deep that there are no more bridges to be built, no more ladders of upward mobility to be climbed, a howl of pain mangled into the scream of a warrior. Their rage is as sad as it is frightening, as impotent as it is shrill. ~ Michael S. Kimmel

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. ~ George McGovern

Soldier gave her a week or two to get over the golden haired Prince with the character of a horned toad and the soul of a slug ~ Kim Hunter

Was he proud that you became a soldier?" "No, it hurt him deeply. He was very angry with me, in his own silent, simmering way. "During the war I did what was expected of me when I pulled on the uniform. I can see now that he was afraid that was what would happen to me. ~ S.R. Wilsher

And the first king was a lucky soldier. ~ S.M. Stirling

Adeline is Battered & Threatened

Not knowing the title of this bureaucrat, I addressed him incorrectly as Meine Herrschaften. With this silly fabricated title, I simply tried to explain to him that the corporal was a brave Frontsoldat. My efforts were in vain since he was intent on finding out the corporal's name, and my stalling only made matters worse. "What's his name?" he shouted again and again, this time hitting my breasts and punching me in the stomach, which caused me to vomit all over the floor. It didn't matter to him that my husband was a German soldier fighting for das Vaterland. He continued to beat me and threatened to put me into the terrible prison camp at Schirmeck. Having passed by there recently, the crying and moaning sounds from inside the gates of this prison were still very vivid in my mind. He reached for his telephone and said, "With one call you'll be there if you don't answer me!" "Please, I won't be able to live with myself if I'm the cause of an innocent person's death," I sobbed. I remember him saying, "I remember you! You're the woman from Bischoffsheim who helped with the kindergarten class and did the art work there. You have two little girls, don't you?" How could this man know so much about me? He continued his threats by saying that he would beat my little girls at 3 o'clock every afternoon in the Village center, until I gave him the names he wanted. I formed a mental image of this cruel act, however in spite of this, I firm ~ Hank Bracker

The soldier 's courage and sacrifice is full of glory , expressing devotion to country , to cause, to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious , and we must never trumpet it as such. ~ Barack Obama

At least when Israel releases terrorists to gain the freedom of one of its soldiers, the country's leaders have the grace to treat the decision as a regrettable action made out of necessity and nothing to celebrate. ~ Jonathan S. Tobin

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month. ~ Andrew Bacevich

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. ~ C.S. Lewis

The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one's country ~ George S. Patton Jr.

I thought killing was easy for you," said Laurent. His voice was rather quiet. "I thought you did it without thinking."
"I'm a soldier," said Damen, "and I have been for a long time. I've killed on the sawdust. I've killed in battle. Is that what you mean by easy?"
"You know it isn't," said Laurent, in that same quiet voice. ~ C.S. Pacat

A poll of U.S. servicemen indicated that 44 percent would like to kill a Japanese soldier while only 6 percent felt the same way about Germans. ~ David Livingstone Smith

Then there is the matter of the presidential untruths. The problem is not just that Barack Obama says things that are untrue but that he lies about what Barack Obama has said. He brags that he set red lines, but then he says it was the U.N. had set red lines. He boasts of pulling out every U.S. soldier from Iraq but then alleges that President Bush, the Iraqis, or Maliki did that. He claims that ISIS are Jayvees but then claims they are serious. But his prevarication too is habitual and was known in 2008 when it was discovered that he had simply misled the nation about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He had no desire, in the transparent manner of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain, or George W. Bush, to release his medical records or college transcripts. If Americans find their president ill-informed, there was no record that he was informed in 2008. His gaffes were far more frequent than those of Sarah Palin, who knew there were 50 states. ~ Anonymous

We feasted on love; every mode of it, solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. She was my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign, my trusty comrade, friends, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend has ever been to me. ~ C.S. Lewis

He killed, his sword shearing, shield and horse a ram, pushing in, and further in, opening a space by force alone for the momentum of the men behind him. Beside him a man fell to a spear in the throat. To his left, an equine scream as Rochert's horse went down.
In front of him, methodically, men fell, and fell, and fell.
He split his attention. He swept a sword cut aside with his shield, killed a helmed soldier, and all the while flung out his mind, waiting for the moment when Touar's lines split open. The most difficult part of commanding from the front was this
staying alive in the moment, while tracking in his mind, critically, the whole fight. Yet it was exhilarating, like fighting with two bodies, at two scales. ~ C.S. Pacat

The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now ~ Erich Maria Remarque

...[A]s you read opinions and history in school about 2004... I want you to know... that going to this war was right. No matter what you hear 20 years from now by elite media and historians, things get distorted... Just like Vietnam, I fear OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) will be abused in the same way. Just as you hear more about American soldiers in Vietnam raping women and children and shooting unarmed men, today the media is focused about this detainee debacle for two weeks solid, in contrast to American Soldiers being dragged in the streets and dismembered, which was covered for less than 72 hours. I am part of the Special Operations Forces elite... We are harder than anyone at these detention centers and let me tell you, we treat these guys with the utmost professionalism. We do not hit them, we don't humiliate them or cause them any bodily harm for the purpose of entertainment. As a Christian, one assumes great compassion... This is WAR and treated very seriously. People are being killed and it is our job to get information... The humanity in me wants me to warm them, tell them their family is okay, feed them, and even embrace them in a loving way... Most, even in my stature, feel the same way. This is the American Soldier. ~ Eric Blehm

The soldier is the army. ~ George S. Patton

The true test of a soldier's mettle is to see whether or not they will cling to what they believe in, even in the face of impending death. ~ Matthew S. Williams

Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.'
'P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed. ~ Stella Gibbons

All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil - every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. ~ C.S. Lewis

He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance
I know that the spades
Are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds
Mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart ~ Sting

Go, bid the soldiers shoot. ~ William Shakespeare

[S]ometimes, when you are a food person, the possible irrelevance of what you are doing doesn't cross your mind until it's too late. (Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop a lot of recipes using capers, and it was weeks of tossing capers into just about everything but milkshakes before I came to terms with the fact that nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in in. ~ Nora Ephron

I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness. ~ William Shakespeare

Every German soldier must be made to feel that he is living under the muzzle of a Russian gun. ~ Vasily Chuikov

But you can't put fight into a man's guts if he
hasn't any fight in him. There are some of us so cowardly that you
can't ever make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.
We know too much, maybe. There are some of us who don't live in the
moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind. ~ Henry Miller

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter