War Correspondents Quotes

A military situation at its worst can inspire fighting men to perform at their best. ~ Marguerite Higgins

Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud. ~ Peter F. Hamilton

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris. ~ A.J. Liebling

Well, the movie isn't bad. For a while, I even told myself I liked it, even as it missed one mark after another. But in the end, it's shapeless and blandly apolitical, apart from its watered-down feminism. You see, Fey's Kim Baker - changed from Barker - transforms herself from a neophyte reporter, condescended to by male war correspondents, soldiers and Afghan officials, into a hard-charging political animal who speaks the language fluently and parties as hard as men. That's about as edgy as a sitcom. ~ David Edelstein

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals. ~ Tom Glenn

As far as I knew, no kingdom had ever gone to war with another over fermented grape juice. Though ~ Lisa Shearin

I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics, and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children the right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Adams saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the right to pursue your own happiness. ~ Charles Krauthamer John Adams

People talk about history and things like slavery, genocide, and religious persecution as horrors that happened in the past because we were ignorant. But nothing's changed. We still hate what we don't understand. ~ J. Matthew Nespoli

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over. ~ Mo Hayder

While they trace their history back to wars that helped to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and to their exploits in the Civil War fighting for the South, the modern-day Rangers were created to help rejuvenate a defeated and demoralized U.S. imperialism after the war in Vietnam. ~ Brendan Sexton III

Has there ever been a country that, once colonized, avoided civil war? ~ Roma Tearne

The evening was a string of miserable minutes strung together in tiny clusters. Three minutes for a man shot through the shoulder; Ellis put first a finger in the entry wound and then another in the exit and when his fingers touched, he decided the man was only lightly injured and didn't need a surgeon. Three minutes to set a broken wrist and splint it with a strip of cowhide and a piece of wood from a sycamore tree. Two minutes to tourniquet a leg, then extract a piece of wire deep in the meat of it. A minute to peek under a pink, saturated bandage several inches below a slender belly button; he saw thin, red water leaking from a hole and smelled urine, knew the ball had breached the bladder. It would either heal or it wouldn't, but nothing to do about it so he set the soul aside, a case not to be operated upon. He turned a man's head looking for the source of a trickle of blood and had ten terrible minutes trying to stop torrential bleeding from under his clavicle; frantic moments during which he could get neither a finger nor a clamp around the pulsating source. All bleeding stops eventually though, and the case did not violate the rule. He took two minutes to settle his own breathing, then four minutes sewing a torn scalp, and half a minute saying a prayer over a fat, cigar-shaped dead man. After awhile, he had the impression he wasn't seeing men, but parts - an exploded chest, a blood swolled thigh, a busted jaw with its teeth spat to the wind or swallowed.

I ~ Edison McDaniels

It was something he'd learned in the war: only think about what is directly in front of you. ... plan ahead all the time... but (don't ) feel ahead.
Pg 88 ~ Helen Dunmore

The practice of lying is concerned with attempting to overlay a thin paper substitute atop the world that exists in order that it seem to suit your purposes. But the Swallow Man didn't need the world to suit him. He could make himself suit whatever world it pleased him to agree existed. ~ Gavriel Savit

My generals are a parcel of post inspectors. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Peace is the whole truth that wishes to enrapture humanity. War is the whole falsehood that wants to capture humanity. Peace begins in the soul and ends in the heart. War begins in the mind and ends in the body. ~ Sri Chinmoy

Firing off 1,000 or 500 or 2,000 nuclear warheads on a few minutes' consideration has always struck me as an absurd way to go to war. ~ William Odom

Ursula missed the sound of church bells. There were so many simple things she had taken for granted before the war. She wished that she could go back and appreciate them properly. ~ Kate Atkinson

The humiliation was hard to bear. Many of the faces I saw spoke of the same thing. In their own countries, these people had power, even the respect of their communities. Here in the Jungle we were barely human. We were the beasts that gave this place its name.
I imagined myself running up to some high-ranking French official and shaking them to demand answers. It wasn't my fault I wasn't born in Europe. My home was a war zone - did that somehow make me less human? ~ Gulwali Passarlay

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Since we became Buddhist, we have lived in peace with them. We did not invade them. We did not want them to invade us. We have never declared war on China. ~ Dalai Lama

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are. To follow a path with heart, we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without, how it begins and how it ends. War's roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life's fleeting changes, the inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our aging and death. Misunderstanding leads us to fight against life, running from pain or grasping at security and pleasures that by their nature can never be satisfying. ~ Jack Kornfield

During the few months Troy had been back home, he'd told his friends about us, and so we quickly eased into the conversation as though we'd all known each other for many years. They embarrassed us with great thanks for having served overseas. They recounted combat events Troy had told them, and we realized by the context of their stories that Troy had made us heroes for his friends because we'd been heroes to him. At this point I was the saddest I'd yet been over Troy's passing, because the true friend from war is the friend who obliterates his own story by telling the stories of others. ~ Anthony Swofford

Only after the rise of the Nazi party and the atrocities of the Holocaust was racial science widely rejected. Subsequently, many earlier proponents of racial science began to retract or modify the claims of their previous work, and by the end of World War II, scholarly interest in race had shifted from "proving" the science of race to challenging its ontology and examining the root of racial prejudice. Then, in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement drew widespread visibility to southern racism, many Whites attempted to distance themselves from the image of the "mean racist" by abandoning any mention of race altogether. This was especially the case with respect to whiteness. Having thoroughly identified whiteness with White supremacists, many Whites simply stopped thinking of themselves as White. They crafted a color-blind racial ideology that reinforced the idea that noticing, acknowledging, or talking about race was undesirable. Likewise, noticing, acknowledging, or talking about racism was also undesirable. ~ Chanequa Walker-Barnes

I declare a holy war, my Moslem brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all. ~ Haj Amin Al-Husseini

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine. ~ Nancy Gibbs

Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that. Our chief method is to learn warfare through warfare. A person who has had no opportunity to go to school can also learn warfare - he can learn through fighting in war. A revolutionary war is a mass undertaking; it is often not a matter of first learning and then doing, but of doing and then learning, for doing is itself learning. ~ Mao Zedong

A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical. ~ Conrad Black

The growing spirit of kindliness and reconciliation between the North and South after the frightful differences of a generation ago ought to be a source of deep congratulation to all, and especially to those whose mistreatment caused the war; but if that reconciliation is to be marked by the industrial slavery and civic death of those same black men, with permanent legislation into a position of inferiority, then those black men, if they are really men, are called upon by every consideration of patriotism and loyalty to oppose such a course by all civilized methods, even though such opposition involves disagreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

America became a special source of attraction to people who were fleeing the aftereffects of the 30 Years War and the religious persecution that began to sweep through Europe in the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And when people got here, very often they succeeded. ~ Mitch Horowitz

When my mother wanted to teach me a lesson about life,' said Luca Dotti, 'she never used stories about her career. She always told stories about the war. The war was very, very important to her. It made her who she was. ~ Robert Matzen

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

If wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth. ~ Julian Assange

If we wish to fight, the enemy can be forced to an engagement even though he be sheltered behind a high rampart and a deep ditch. All we need do is attack some other place that he will be obliged to relieve. ~ Sun Tzu

I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming - making people not know who they are. If someone knows who he is, really knows, then he doesn't need to hate. That's why we still need Namers, because there are places throughout the universe like your planet Earth. When everyone is really and truly Named, then the Echthroi will be vanquished. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money. ~ Janet Flanner

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. ~ Dagobert D. Runes

I need to find out if I'm as good at peace as I am at war ~ Orson Scott Card

They were on the edge of a desert now. Still - they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come. There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden. The clocks ticked on, the fires crackled, the translucent candles dripped. And then there was a knock on the door, and in came four guards and one hundred American prisoners of war. The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city. Yes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Selfishness is that detestable vice which no one will forgive in others, and no one is without himself. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse - anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation - is far worse and much harder to survive. ~ Lisa See

Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men. ~ Bruce Catton

In the war room, love? What if someone comes in?"
I stood and removed his shirt. "Then they'll have a good story to tell."
"Good?" He adopted the pretense of being offended.
"Prove me wrong. ~ Maria V. Snyder

I think you have bits of Primord in your hair...And you look …bloody...You look a mess, Halíka...But you are still the most beautiful woman I have ever laid my eyes on. ~ Alexandra May

Alas! ... what is it, valiant knight, save an offering of sacrifice to a demon of vain glory, and a passing through the fire of Moloch? What remains to you as a prize of all the blood you have spilled, of all the travail and pain you have endured, of all the tears which your deeds have caused, when death hath broken the strong man's spear, and overtaken the speed of his war-horse? ~ Walter Scott

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. ~ Smedley Butler

I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life. ~ Don McCullin

Peace is inside us, it's a natural state of mind;
to find it, we create war, destroy the world like a blind. ~ Debasish Mridha

He has entertained the thought that his neighbours like having one of him in the district, having their own Englishman, although he will insist that he is as South African as they are. But perhaps his presence is more in the nature of a provocation, and his actions: he pretends ignorance but he knows what those spindly pink and white flowers mean to men who still punish themselves with every detail of their war, picking at it like the scab of the miniature Union Jack in the middle of the flag. ~ Claire Robertson

We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it ... I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come. ~ George McGovern