There was nothing green left; artillery had denuded and scarred every inch of ground. Tiny flares glowed and disappeared. Shrapnel burst with bluish white puffs. Jets of flamethrowers flickered and here and there new explosions...

I said, ‘I have heard people talk about war as if it was a very fine thing.’ Ah!’ said [Captain], ‘I should think they never saw it. No doubt it is very fine when there...

As for the smoking of marijuana, it is the exploitation for the workers.” Both favor alcohol and are against pot.

Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a ‘real’ war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high...

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She...

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of...

No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.

Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky’s eyeglasses; Gandhi’s native-spun cloth, Cortes’ pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little...

The war had made some into libertines and some into serious, sober men.

Armed violence and peace cannot coexist. We need to overcome the challenges we face and seek practical solutions. We must replace the culture of war with the culture of peace.

One question in my mind, which I hardly dare mention in public, is whether patriotism has, overall, been a force for good or evil in the world. Patriotism is rampant in war and there are...

Toxic remnants of war represent a profound challenge for the protection of public health and the restoration of the environment in countries affected by conflict.

The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.

You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well contentBy any jest of mine. These men are worthYour tears:You are not worth their merriment.

Merin smiled. “I fought in battle and your mother bore two children. Of the two of us, I think she was the courageous one.

After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France,...

It was over a century and a half ago that Clausewitz made his now famous remarks on the relationship of war to policy. Most simply, “war is not a mere act of policy, but a...

The world is full of grief and no peace but every body has a different way of ending it.

I am a Christian, but my time in Iraq has convinced me that God doesn’t want to hear from me anymore. I’ve done things that He can never forgive. I’ve done them consciously. I’ve made...

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.

Ni rahisi kushinda vita ya maisha na kuishi mbinguni duniani. Ni vigumu kushinda vita ya dhambi na kuishi mbinguni paradiso.

If women ruled the world there would be no wars. But, we all would have been aborted.

There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression...

The love of conflict is most evident when opposing forces join sides to defeat the peacemaker.

Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the...

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate....

I love that name. A country named Chad. Sounds like somebody who lived next door to the Brady Bunch. But if Chad actually lived next door to the Bradys, Greg would be roasting over a...

But as much as this is a soldier’s reason d’etre, it is not often that you hear a soldier explicitly talk about ‘killing’. The k-word as a verb is instead often disguised and supplanted by...

Dear Mary Duende, It’s freezing here in the trenches, but loneliness is colder than any hyperthermia. Gunshots and shrapnel have become my companions. But life is better now than it was when I was at...

I want to put silencers on all guns. That way war will be nothing more than a whisper in the future. And all those who are caught whispering will be shot.

Handing me a pen is like handy a madman a knife…at the end of it you know you’ll end up with a lot of broken bones, blood, and bodies – but it’ll be one hell...

…all the men in the photograph wear puttees. All the men in the picture are bound, trying to keep themselves together. That is how considerate they are, for the love of God and country and...

Thanks to my grandpa, I can go to France and not be visiting Germany. He single-handedly won WWII (he only has one hand).

A dead eagle he might have buried, but he had chosen rather to light a fire for a phoenix.

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles...

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools,...

Wars are men’s failures.

Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

… We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in blood of his followers and sacrifices of his friends.

We are asking if thought can be aware of itself. That is rather a complex question, and requires very careful observation. Thought has created wars through nationalism, through sectarian religions. Thought has created all this;...

He once told Allie and I that if he’d had to shoot anybody, he wouldn’t’ve known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.

The enemy,” retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, “is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you...

All are at war with the one who wars against self.

If you will not die for us, you cannot ask us to die for you.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

It was a war that didn’t have to be fought, it was a strategic blunder, it was poorly executed, poorly designed and right now, after two years, we still don’t have a winning strategy.

Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again … we are survivors....

War is the most evil kind of human approach; unless it is for good cause.