Quotes & Sayings About Someone Going To War

Yes, our old age is not going to be sunny orchard drowse. By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good; why yield a moment to regret or envy or worry? Why indeed? (24 December 1940) — Virginia Woolf

Battle is for an army to win or lose; war is for civilization to win or lose. — Ian C. Esslemont

Death, in its silent sure march is fast gathering those whom I have longest loved, so that when he shall knock at my door, I will more willingly follow. — Robert E.Lee

If we are at war, we're not fighting for a bewitched alchemical manuscript, or for my safety, or for our right to marry and have children. This is about the future of all of us." I saw that future for just a moment, its bright potential spooling away in a thousand different directions. "If our children don't take the next evolutionary steps, it will be someone else's children. And whiskey isn't going to make it possible for me to close my eyes and forget that. No one else will go through this kind of hell because they love someone they're not supposed to love. I won't allow it. — Deborah Harkness

The M-1 is the best tank in the world, if you can get it to the war in time, if you have a Saddam Hussein who'll give you seven months to move your forces in. — Ralph Peters

You know it's going to be Mary the Maid, or someone like her, and there's going to be two men and she will end up with the nice one, and there has to be misunderstandings, and they never do anything more than kiss and it's absolutely guaranteed that, for example, an exciting civil war or an invasion by trolls or even a scene with any cooking in it is not going to happen. The best you can expect is a thunderstorm. — Terry Pratchett

The truth is I had no idea what I was doing when it came to you, Amani. I tried to leave you in Dustwalk because I didn't want to drag you into my brother's war. I came back for you because I didn't want to see you die at the hands of my other brother. But either way, I was bound to wind up doing one or the other. Just depended on which one." His hand came up like he was going to reach for me but dropped to his side instead. "I was glad in Sazi when I saw you'd gone because it meant you'd escaped on your own path, and I was glad when you took the compass because it gave me a reason to go after you. And yes, I lied to keep you out of Izman because I was afraid someone would know what you were and you'd get snapped up and sold to the Sultan. And I steered you toward Dassama figuring there was a chance I might be able to deliver you to the sea and get you out of this country before it killed you. — Alwyn Hamilton

After he made up his mind to spend the rest of the war in the hospital, Yossarian wrote letters to everyone he knew saying that he was in the hospital but never mentioning why. One day he had a better idea. To everyone he knew he wrote that he was going on a very dangerous mission. "They asked for volunteers. It's very dangerous, but someone has to do it. I'll write you the instant I get back." And he had not written anyone since. — Joseph Heller

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders. — Sebastian Junger

When they killed him, Mother wouldn't hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I've learned to appreciate thorns since. The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who've fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it IS a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him loose them all. — Mark Lawrence

Cuz that's it -
That's the nasty, nasty secret of war -
When yer winning -
When yer winning, it's effing thrilling - — Patrick Ness

Peace through strength works; but the flip side is war invited by weakness. — Pete Hegseth

The joke was that President Bush only declared war when Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone has to pay. — Chris Kyle

If things do get better in Iraq, I'm saying as someone who thinks the war was a mistake. I'm saying that is cause for us all to have a huge party. It's a big deal if things get better. Because if they don't get better, our country is going to be hurt for generations. — Tucker Carlson

War may represent the failure of diplomacy, but even the best diplomats operate on credit. Sooner or later someone who's less reasonable than you are is going to call you, and if your military can't cover your I.O.U.s, you lose. — David Weber

Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces. — Merrill McPeak

Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about? — Jimmy Santiago Baca

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing." — Jacqueline Winspear

I don't believe it is good to constantly deify war as if peace, which is the happiness and glory of the world, could be the shame of nations. — Lamartine

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba'athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city. — Lawrence Anthony

An ancient mustiness padded the air, tinged with with an acrid scent-a trace of the war between paper and oxygen, played out in slow inexorable burn that would one day crumble this empire to dust. -page 62 — Jennifer Lee Carrell

I was a child during the Lebanese civil war, and I remember Israeli bombardments. So growing up, my view of Israel was completely negative. I'm not coming from a neutral place, but with time, I've had to re-examine my thinking. — Ziad Doueiri

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike. This then was the period that brings me to the period of the beginning of 1914. Everything being alike everything naturally would be simply different and war came and everything being alike and everything being simply different brings everything being simply different brings it to romanticism. — Gertrude Stein

Give me an Army of West Point graduates and I'll win a battle ... Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I'll win a war. — George S. Patton Jr.

The report defines acts of ethnic cleansing as including the separation of men from women, the detention of men, and the destruction of houses and their repopulation by another ethnic group later on. This was precisely the repertoire of the Jewish soldiers in the 1948 war. — Noam Chomsky

Why did people fall in love?he wondered as he watched Rock and Doris pretend to do just that. Obviously, it made people ridiculous and not just in movies from the sixties. There had to be some basis in real life or no one would ever have made a silly comedy about love. Yeah, there were also movies about love that weren't comedies, but in those movies people acted ridiculous for a while and then someone announced the were going to die, or they had to go off to war, or oops I forgot to mention my wife. People stopped acting ridiculous and starting acting really serious and sad, sad because the ridiculous part was over. How could people want this foolishness in their lives? — Marshall Thornton

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler's life, Finny had said, "If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler's temple, he'd miss." There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper's triumphal arch around Brinker's keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well - "How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?" He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944. — John Knowles

The American system of civilian control of the military recognizes that soldiers' attention must be fixed on winning battles and staying alive, and that the fog of war can sometimes obscure the rule of law. — Andrew Rosenthal

Caillen stood on the other side with a perplexed frown. "What are you doing?" He motioned to the blaster in Syn's hand. "Going to war?" Syn lowered his blaster. "I didn't know who was scratching around outside my door. It sounded like someone I might want to shoot. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

If the great Western experiment fails and we end up living in totalitarian war-on-terrorism states, one day someone's going to say, 'Well democracy doesn't work because they had to give it up'. — Martin Firrell

When we focus on winning the battle for material gains,we end up losing spiritual war.If we had a better self of ethics we would be better prepared to deal with the complicated world in which we find ourselves. — David V. Gaggin

War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders.' — George W. Bush

So out of the six major subcontractors who buy from us, there are two left? Man, that's a turf war, right there."
"And whoever's pulling this shit is probably going to try to work his way up the food chain." Trez spoke up. "Which is why iAm and I think you should have someone with you twenty-four/seven until this shit shakes out."
Rehv seemed annoyed but he didn't disagree. "We got any intel on who's leaving all those bodies around?"
"Well, duh," Trez said. "People think it's you."
"Not logical. Why would I kill off my own buyers?"
Now Rehv was the one getting the hairy eyeball from the peanut gallery.
"Oh, come on," he said. "I'm not that bad. Well, okay, but only if someone fucks with me."

-Rehv & Trez — J.R. Ward

May we all co-operate and join this war on pirates, — Jackie Chan

The fact that someone had decided I'd be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well. — Sophia McDougall

All I could think was that he, too, was going to war; that he, too, was leaving Deyning, leaving my world. I'd only just found him, only just realized that the universe included someone named Tom Cuthbert and now he was about to disappear. It seemed already the war had found me. — Judith Kinghorn

I wish to see, in process of disappearing, that only thing which ever could bring this nation to civil war. — Abraham Lincoln

Hold onto one thought: You're not important. You're not anything. Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddam steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. — Ray Bradbury

I firmly believe this ... that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better, than the builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall become a reproach and bye word down to future ages. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter from this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing governments by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war and conquest. — Benjamin Franklin

War reporting is still essentially the same - someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people, be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. — Marie Colvin

Why is it when you fall in love with someone (and especially when you are trying extremely hard not to do so), the world seems to conspire against you in order to cause that person to be the only thing on your mind? It doesn't matter what you're doing: reading, driving, walking down the road. You just look up and, BANG, there is their name or some form of it. Then you smile, and you think of them. That's when you realize there isn't any way to get out of this one alive and unscathed, because it's already a battle that you've lost, and the war is going to rage on forever after. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. — N.K. Jemisin

They're definitely going to declare war tomorrow. In the morning. It's probably timed so that the nation can get down on its collective knees in church and pray for deliverance.' 'Oh, yes, war is always so Christian, isn't it? — Kate Atkinson

The Romans never allowed a trouble spot to remain simply to avoid going to war over it, because they knew that wars don't just go away, they are only postponed to someone else's advantage. Therefore, they made war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, in order not to have to fight them in Italy ... They never went by that saying which you constantly hear from the wiseacres of our day, that time heals all things. They trusted rather their own character and prudence - knowing perfectly well that time contains the seeds of all things, good as well as bad. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, 'We're remembering'. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we're going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them. — Ray Bradbury

Hang on a moment!" said Ron sharply. "We've forgotten someone!" "Who?" asked Hermione. "The house-elves, they'll all be down in the kitchen, won't they?" "You mean we ought to get them fighting?" asked Harry. "No," said Ron seriously, "I mean we should tell them to get out. We don't want any more Dobbies, do we? We can't order them to die for us - " There was a clatter as the basilisk fangs cascaded out of Hermione's arms. Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that he lifted Hermione off her feet. "Is this the moment?" Harry asked weakly, and when nothing happened except that Ron and Hermione gripped each other still more firmly and swayed on the spot, he raised his voice. "OI! There's a war going on here! — J.K. Rowling

Even if it's very late at night. Someone's always awake in the world. But of all those things you could think up for people to be doing, I think going hungry would have to be your safest bet. Going hungry, pushing each other around, leaving bombs, breaking promises, leaving nothing. It happens far away all the time. But sometimes near. We're almost two kinds of people. Some of us see it on the evening news or read about it in the morning paper. And some of us get hurt. But, you know we all get hurt. Because even if you live in a very nice house like I do, sooner or later the lies and the fires have got to burn you. — Ann Druyan

Terrorism': the word that means nothing, yet justifies everything. — Glenn Greenwald

We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam. — Barack Obama

And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides. — Antonin Artaud

Whether in an advantageous position or a disadvantageous one, the opposite state should be always present to your mind. — Sun Tzu

China is thus following a path similar to that set by the United States after World War II, when it gave unstinting support to undemocratic governments in the Middle East on the promise of long-term access to low-priced oil-though without the huge arms transfers that accompanied, and remain a key component of, US political support. — Melvin Gurtov

I guess if people couldn't profit from war I don't think there would be war. — Lily Tomlin

All of us who grew up before World War II are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. — Margaret Mead

Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed. — Henry David Thoreau

I am going to explain to you why we went to war. Why mankind always does to war. It is not social or political. It is not countries that go to war, but men. It is like salt. Once one has been to war, one has salt for the rest of one's life. Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women from laughing at them. — John Fowles

There was a saying during the war: Those who decide late will always decide right. At Christmas in 1943 we could see that our front was moving backwards, but we had no real idea how bad it was. Anyway, no one could accuse Sindre of changing like a weather-vane. Unlike those at home who sat on their backsides during the war and suddenly rushed to join the Resistance in the last months. We used to call them the latter-day saints'. A few of them today swell the ranks of those who make public statements about the Norwegians' heroic efforts for the right side. — Jo Nesbo

Capoeira is a game, it is dance, it is fight, it is of war and it is of peace, it is of culture, of music, it is a portion of things. — Reinaldo Ramos Suassuna

Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world. — Douglas MacArthur

We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out. — Jackie French

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century. — Barbara Tuchman

You do not comprehend. It is not the victim who concerns me so much. It is the effect on the character of the slayer."
"What about war?"
"In war you do not exercise the right of private judgement. That is what is so dangerous. Once a man is imbued with the idea that he knows who ought to be allowed to live and who ought not - then he is halfway to becoming the most dangerous killer there is - the arrogant killer who kills not for profit - but for an idea. He has usurped the functions of le bon Dieu. — Agatha Christie

Shakespeare is all big themes, like the most amazing love, or the most scary war. — Anna Torv

Pray excuse me. I cannot take it. — Jefferson Davis

The kids are saying 'Make Love, Not War',
and I'm beginning to think they're right.
For war costs millions of dollars a day,
and love
just a few bucks a night! — Nipsey Russell

The sorrow of war inside a soldier's heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a daness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. — Bao Ninh

You find surprising things about the privite life of a country when you invide it — Evan Wright

So Captain Faith conducted the prince and his mighty captains and men of war into the castle in the very heart of Mansoul. Prince Emmanuel had come home. — Ethel Barrett

War can protect; it cannot create. — Alfred North Whitehead

On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed. — Eliot Engel

War is when your government tells you who the enemy is. A revolution is when you figure it out yourself. — Anonymous

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. — George Bernard Shaw

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction. — John Boyd Orr

Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime, if modern men of light and leading saw your face closer, simple folk would see it hardly ever. — Winston S. Churchill