Quotes & Sayings About Barbed Wire

We were made to believe / our faces betrayed us. / Our bodies were loud / with yellow / screaming flesh / needing to be silenced / behind barbed wire. — Janice Mirikitani

45,000 sections of reinforced concrete - three tons each.
Nearly 300 watchtowers.
Over 250 dog runs.
Twenty bunkers.
Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches - signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails.
Over 11,000 armed guards.
A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.
200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.
96 miles of concrete wall.

Not your typical holiday destination.

JF Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this - among other - notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it. — Joanna Campbell

take it from an old man like me, life's too short to get hung up on a little bit of barbed wire — Theresa Shea

There was a huge wire fence that ran along the length of the house and turned in at the top, extending further along in either direction, further than she could possibly see. The fence was very high, higher even than the house they were standing in, and there were huge wooden posts, like telegraph poles, dotted along it, holding it up. At the top of the fence enormous bales of barbed wire were tangled in spirals, and Gretel felt an unexpected pain inside her as she looked at the sharp spikes sticking out all the way round it. — John Boyne

I watched her index finger trace the barbed wire tattoo that wrapped around my bicep. "Was this to signify anything?"
"Not really." Even a gentle touch from her made my pulse jump. "I got it after I graduated high school. I was so pissed that my parents were gone. Thought I was badass."
She smiled and kissed my chest. "You just made love to me on a Harley. You are totally badass. — Lisa Kessler

I can't tell if I'm feeling butterflies or barbed wire in my stomach. — Jessica Hawkins

True Love Isn't Hearts & Flowers. It's Blood & Guts & Bouquets Of Barbed Wire — Dean Cavanagh

Borders crumble; they won't hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food - there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide. — Barbara Kingsolver

The age of isolation is gone. And gone are the days in which barbed wire served as demarcation lines, separating and isolating countries from one another. No country can escape looking beyond its boundaries to find the source of the currents which influence how it can live with others. — Gamal Abdel Nasser

When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view. — Sophia Loren

And you, Bloss, may shove it ... sideways ... with barbed wire wrapped around it. — McKevett

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It puts what should be above things as they are.
It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master. — Czeslaw Milosz

What's so funny?" "Your panties have a bow," he said. I looked down. I was wearing a short tank top -not mine- and my blue panties with a narrow white strip of lace at the top and a tiny white bow. Would it have killed me to check what I was wearing before I pulled the blanket down? "What's wrong with bows?" "Nothing." He was grinning now. "I expected barbed wire. Or one of those steel chains." Wiseass. "I'm secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft." "I bet. — Ilona Andrews

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles. — Raymond Chandler

Cuba is just a slave-prison. Our only crime is brith, but our sentence is life behind barbed wire and prison bars. — Jaxy Mono

Basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence. — Donna Tartt

I ran straight into the wooden fence at the foot of the field.
I was lucky that it had been a rail fence, rather than a barbed wire, or I would have shredded myself into vampire linguine. — Helen Keeble

Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire which prevents the Hindus from co-mingling and which has, therefore, to be pulled down. Caste is a notion; it is a state of the mind. — B.R. Ambedkar

* * *THE FILES OF RECOLLECTION* * *
Oh, yes, I definitely remember him
The sky was murky and deep like quicksand.
There was a young man parceled up in barbed wire,
like a giant crown of thorns. I untangled him and carried him
out. High above the earth, we sank together,
to our knees. It was just another day, 1918. — Markus Zusak

But I do, and the barbed wire tightens once more, until my heart is strangled and broken. — A.G. Howard

Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not - and is not - a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a "barbed-wire entanglement" designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power. — Jacob G. Hornberger

How could I remain unyielding? His words penetrated the flimsy barriers I'd set up around my heart. I'd meant to set up a barbed wire fence, but the barbs ended up being covered with marshmallows. He slipped through my defenses easily. He touched his forehead to my hand, and my marshmallow heart melted. — Colleen Houck

I have a whole box full of pieces of the Berlin Wall and a heart made from the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain. It's - they're cherished treasures to me now, of course. — Carol Guzy

nub. Tori nearly came unglued and started rocking and trembling so hard, the bed shook beneath her. The fleeting caress of Sam's tongue stretched her body taut, stringing her nerve endings tighter than a barbed-wire fence. "Sam . . . please . . . I need . . . " "I know, babe. I know what you need." "I need it now . . . Please!" Tori thought she'd die if Sam didn't touch her again. She lifted her butt and felt his hands clamp around her hips, and then that wonderful magic feeling of his tongue on her flesh sent her soaring into a maelstrom of sensations too powerful to resist. Sam held on to Tori as he laved her with his tongue, milking her orgasm for several moments before finally moving — Anne Marie Novark

What had he been Thinking? If a fella was looking for love, I was the wrong road to go down. I was the road, in fact, that was crawling with barbed wire and bears and dynamite, marked with huge signs that said THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE. — Joshilyn Jackson

I believe a young player will run through a barbed wire fence for you. An older player looks for a hole in the fence. — Brendan

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it's red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning. I didn't hear the bells. Perhaps I've become used to them. We — Margaret Atwood

Peaceful circulation has been interupted by barbed wire and concrete blocks. For a city or a people to be truly free, they must have the secure right, without economic, political or police pressure, to make their own choices and live their own lives. — John F. Kennedy

Look how beautiful the green lawns of the park are in the misty evening light, unmuddied, smooth, alive, no holes, no bodies, no barbed wire, no explosions. Such a simple thing to be grateful for. No wrongness. Can no wrongness be enough to make rightness? God, no wrongness. No wrongness would be fucking marvellous. — Louisa Young

If I had to marry someone, it wouldn't be a bossy little gal with a tongue like barbed-wire and a mind about as narrow. — Jim Thompson

had gone to work in Worcester's famous Washburn & Moen barbed wire factory: Swedes were preferred by employers there because, unlike the Irish, they did not tend to get either fighting drunk or unionized. — Richard Davenport-Hines

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when
people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the
same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling
down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn't
need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could
pin you to the ground, far more efficiently. — Greg Egan

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high in weeds and young trees. The trees have entirely encased a speed limit sign, strange sight, nothing so pointless as a speed limit sign in the midst of dense woods, pointless and beautifully so. — Tim Gilmore

Life is a bucket of shit with a barbed wire handle. — Jim Thompson

Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said "We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!" - Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how. — Jack Kerouac

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. — Charles Stross

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. — Ronald Reagan

Standing up for yourself is about more than flinging barbed-wire insults around. Its about picking your battles, knowing when to fight, knowing exactly what and who is worth fighting for. — Paula Stokes

This is my barbed wire dress. It protects the property but doesn't hide the view. — Candy Darling

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundreds other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to die tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today? — Primo Levi

The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery
a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge. — Rick Bass

A hymn for freedom;
without border barriers and barbed wire fences.
A hymn for freedom;
without astute words.
A hymn for freedom;
without wars of every man against every man.
A hymn to freedom;
at any time and any place,
because only freedom will set us free. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy. — Diriye Osman

The inside of his skull, it tasted like roses and barbed wire and butterflies. Switchblades and heroin and grassy green gardens. — Mercedes M. Yardley

Do you know what a free mind is? Have you ever observed your own mind? It is not free, is it? You are always watching to see what your friends say about you. Your mind is like a house enclosed by a fence or by barbed wire. In that state no new thing can take place. A new thing can happen only when there is no fear. And it is extremely difficult for the mind to be free of fear, because that implies being really free of the desire to imitate, to follow, free of the desire to amass wealth or to conform to a tradition - which does not mean that you do something outrageous. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

A collection of huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in the huts lived 500 of the original inhabitants of our area. And so it went with many country towns around Australia. — Phillip Noyce

The world was a shitpot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it. — Jim Thompson

HER BARBED-WIRE SMILE
LIFTED YOU TO HEAVEN
BUT I HAVE TO ASK
DID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE — Amy King

When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats. I just do not believe that barbed-wire fences or guns on our border will solve any of our problems. — Ron Paul

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t's and b's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best. — Ken Follett

Cassie, I want to be with you. Always. If that involves us being naked and making love in a hundred different ways, every day for the rest of our lives, that's fantastic. If it involves us sitting and talking, wearing barbed wire and cast-iron body suits, that's fantastic, too. I just want you. Now. A week from now. A year. A decade. Whenever you're ready. What I want is never going to change. It's you. Just you. Naked or clothed, doesn't matter to me. — Leisa Rayven

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire. — Andrew O'Hagan

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful. — Harry Crews

I'd rather hug Magic Johnson after he rolled around in barbed wire. — Jim Norton

I read about a guy in Michigan this winter who was cruising along on his snow mobile. "Whoo hoo!" Didn't see a barbed wire fence. FOOM
cut his head right off. And I'll be honest with you, my first thought was ... That's how I want to go. Having the time of your life, "whoo hoo!" FOOM. I want the last thought in my head to be, 'Hey, check out that headless snow mobile driver. He's got a jacket just like mine.' — David Crowe

I will greet you with a mouth full of barbed wire until you learn to stop coming after me with your hands. — Trista Mateer

From some infinite distance, ten thousand twists of light are suddenly projected into your eyes. You watch as they shimmer and tighten together like the hooks of metal in a tangle of barbed wire.
More and more of them appear, filling in the gaps one by one, and soon you are conscious of nothing else.
What would the sky be like if there was nothing to see but stars?
You know that you will not experience anything so beautiful again. — Kevin Brockmeier

True Love Isn't Hearts & Flowers. It's Blood & Guts & Bouquets Of Barbed Wire — Dean Cavanagh

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

That missleproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves. — S.J. Kincaid

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death? — Elie Wiesel

Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don't like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved. — Charles Lindbergh

Line of control must be renamed as garden of love and the barbed wire fencing should be replaced by the garden of flowers. — Amit Ray

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he'll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard's generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn't exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. * — Emmanuel Carrere

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free. — Russell Brand

All anyone really needs to know about barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff made by greedy men. — Billy Connolly

All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. — D.H. Lawrence

Getting many tourists these days?"
"No."
The word was so flat and final, Shelby nearly laughed. "You could always try land mines and barbed wire. It amazes me how anyone so in tune with people could dislike them so much."
"I don't dislike them." Grant heaped eggs on another plate. "I just don't want to be around them. — Nora Roberts

A bikini is like a barbed-wire fence. It protects the property without obstructing the view. — Joey Adams

Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.
And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won't intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.
You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It's been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we'd get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We're already here. — Rudolph Herzog

There was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce - in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had forseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom had not been a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire. — George Orwell

A goddess of dawn
scooted under a zing of barbed wire
to witness your birth. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp. — George Takei

You don't want the United States to become South America, where you have a super collection of rich people at the tippy-top of society, they are surrounded by barbed wire living in McMansions with security guards, and the rest of the society is suffering, and you've got a broken educational system and a broken government. — Anthony Scaramucci

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. — Albert Camus

I can't say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I use words like 'brilliant,' it would really be an under description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called 'impenetrable barrier.' It was a classic- absolutely classic- military breaching of a very very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier. — Norman Schwarzkopf

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. — Ron Rash

When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire - one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men's welfare. — Ayn Rand

David set his foot in a gap higher up the barbed wire ... When would the searchlight come?They could not be certain of hitting him in the dark ... and if they did not hurry, he would be over ... Why didn't they hurry up. Then he stopped. He would run no more.When the beam of light caught him,they should see him walking away quite calmly. Then they would not enjoy it so much; they would feel cheated. The thought filled David with triumph. I am David — Anne Holm

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. — George Orwell

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I ought to have guessed that a person like her
a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us
I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer. — Robert Penn Warren

In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire? — Hal Duncan

One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I'm the one rejecting her. The next, she's got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can't even ask her the simplest questions." "And here I was assuming you didn't care about her." Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned, "I don't!" "And you make it perfectly clear." Men. Idiots. — Jennifer Armintrout

The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing; we were entirely among ourselves. A — Elie Wiesel

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. — Yuri Herrera

Little by litter life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department - a whole government machinery.
Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers. — Elie Wiesel

[Percy] kept hoping things would get better for Annabeth and him, but their lives just got more dangerous, as if the Three Fates were up there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate. — Rick Riordan

As soon as Tara looked at the skull-and-barbed-wire
tattoo showing beneath the sleeve of Flynn O'Mara's tight t-shirt, she flashed on a jail cell. Bummer. His Dad's in jail — Sharon Sala

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people. — George Takei

Eric has said that I carry close to my chest a ball of barbed wire that I sometimes throw at other people. — Weike Wang

What does barbed wire feel like when you grip it, as though it were a plate and a fork, or a handful of flowers? — Mary Oliver

This is how your heart gets
snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away. — Pete Wentz

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun. — Kurt Vonnegut

These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines ... men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy.
As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will ... supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world. — Ernst Junger

Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath. — Luther Burbank

The War,' said a soldier proverb, 'will last a hundred years
five years of fighting and ninety-give of winding up the barbed wire. — Preston William Slosson

It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated
and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher's knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors. — Ray Lyman Wilbur