There is nothing that war has ever achieved that we could not better achieve without it.

Are you a communist?””No I am an anti-fascist””For a long time?””Since I have understood fascism.

I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.

Sometimes time can play tricks. One moment it idles by, an hour can seem a lifetime, such as when sitting by the river at dusk watching the bats snatching insects above the limpid waters; the...

I doubt I would use the word ‘casualty’. There is nothing casual about killing.

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what...

Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of...

What a terrible thing war is, what a terrible thing!

As if men did not die fast enough, they are ingenious at finding out ways to destroy one another.

For too long now divinity and destiny have legitimized what reason and compassion would not. An individual for a family, a family for the kingdom, a kingdom for an empire… And now – an empire...

The story is about being loyal to the truth as a nation, that citizens of a democracy are collectively responsible for what their troops do in war, good or bad.

There would be nothing but darkness, same darkness as everywhere else, an enormous darkness that swallowed up the road two steps ahead of us, only a little sliver of road about the size of your...

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

This is a story of Africa. A pioneer woman’s journey north was merely the beginning.

Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life...

This is stupid.””Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and...

Absolutely everybody gets a little something.

He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: “I had just been assigned to...

Mogadishu the beautiful – your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of...

Three times now… We’ve fought world wars for our own nations, our own villages. We’ve hurt one another. We’ve hated one another. That hatred bred a lust for power, and that lust for power created...

I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellowmen. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our...

1. The desperate Jews – their spirits in my lap as we sat on the roof, next to the steaming chimneys.2. The Russian soldiers – taking only small amounts of ammunition, relying on the fallen...

Si vis pacem, para bellum

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich makes slaves of the poor.

My father’s haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory.

His Noise saying, No, no, not now, not NOW-And then he says, Viola?”I’m here, Todd,” I say, my voice breaking, shouting with desperation. “I’m here!”And he says Voila? again-Asking it-Asking like he’s not sure I’m...

Charlie started crying, in the convulsive, soundless way that men do. “Don’t you understand,” he said after composing himself, “that’s a funeral dirge for the first wave.” We all thought about that, the many lives...

The entire Nazi war machine was only possible because of past, present and future violations of the non aggression principle (achievable only through government).

In the context of war, especially a chaotic war, there is the inevitable targeting of marginal groups. There is a free-roaming sense of violence and a mob mentality.

Never trust the translation or interpretation of something without first trusting its interpreter. One word absent from a sentence can drastically change the true intended meaning of the entire sentence. For instance, if the word...

Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans do not abandon the people.

Trench dirt didn’t always wash out, I am sure.

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely...

In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars …

Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.

Women deserve better than organizations bearing the names of racist rapists funding million dollar campaigns on subway trains. These wealthy middle aged white men tell us what to do with our bodies while they wage...

Bravery without forethought, causes a man to fight blindly and desperately like a mad bull. Such an opponent, must not be encountered with brute force, but may be lured into an ambush and slain.

Be stern in the council-chamber, [Show no weakness, and insist on your plans being ratified by the sovereign.] so that you may control the situation.

These military devices, leading to victory, must not be divulged beforehand.

Damn the wars but bless the soldier.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Of course there is no veneer, the process is one of growth, and primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.

Siempre hay un rey sobre un caballoen las viejas ciudades;lo custodian las fuentes y los niñosy un insólito pájaro.Cuando los veo, pienso que la muertemira de las estatuasarmada hasta los dientes, con sus ojosde bronce...

The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.

War is not natural. We have to be trained for it, soldiers and citizens alike.

And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values...

We must not conceal from ourselves that no improvement in the present depressing situation is possible without a severe struggle; for the handful of those who are really determined to do something is minute in...

I have given my word that only death will take me from you.