Quotes & Sayings About Trenches

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

I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches ... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected. — Jeff Bezos

Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly. Yesterday we were under fire, to-day we act the fool and go foraging through the countryside, to-morrow we go up to the trenches again. We forget nothing really. But so long as we have to stay here in the field, the front-line days, when they are past, sink down in us like a stone; they are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did that, we should have been destroyed long ago. I soon found out this much: - terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; - but it kills, if a man thinks about it. Just — Erich Maria Remarque

I'm on the ground, I've been in swing states, I've been talking to the American people, I've been out there speaking on behalf of Obama's record, I've been in the trenches. — Eva Longoria

It's like a man in the trenches
again: he doesn't know any more why he should go on living, because
if he escapes now he'll only be caught later, but he goes on just
the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has
admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just
his bare nails, and he'll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he'd
slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why. — Henry Miller

No treaty but trenches
all quiet
years to years
home in no man's land. — David Levithan

Seem to float magically above the trenches of commerce, — Peter Heller

Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands.
Then we'll ask ourselves, Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems? — Mahmoud Darwish

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. — Audre Lorde

Sometimes he remembered having heard how soldiers under fire in the trenches, and having nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. It seemed to Pierre that all men were like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in government service. 'Nothing is without consequence, and nothing is important: it's all the same in the end. The thing to do is to save myself from it all as best I can,' thought Pierre. Not to see IT, that terrible IT. — Leo Tolstoy

War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end. — Stonewall Jackson

Those who restrict themselves to mere words limit their gift, and may unintentionally lead believers to pride by increasing knowledge without an increased awareness of God's presence and power. It's in the trenches of Christlike ministry that we learn to become totally dependent upon God. Moving in the impossible through relying on God short-circuits the development of pride. — Bill Johnson

Republicans working in leadership and the trenches are largely old, white, male, out-of-touch, out of ideas, technology averse, and living in the past. — Mark McKinnon

The bravest are usually those whom we do not know or hear about, those anonymous men who dig the trenches, who produce the food. — F. Sionil Jose

Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement--and not like the men who served as a cannon fodder in World War I, dug into the trenches of a senseless and apparently interminable conflict, while lobbing bullets and canisters of poison gas at a supposed enemy, who, like any soldier, just wanted to get off the battlefield and on with a potentially productive and rewarding life. — Stephen Jay Gould

Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. — Robert Graves

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age. — Michael J. Behe

Love comes as fast as shrapnel in the trenches. It's indiscriminate. It gets whoever's closest. — Hugh Howey

Thus thought I, as by night I read Of the great army of the dead, The trenches cold and damp, The starved and frozen camp,
The wounded from the battle-plain, In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors. Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Richmond's newspaper questioned how a senior general could not even get two of his own generals to cooperate with him. They nicknamed him "Granny" Lee or "The King Of Spades," because he insisted that his men dig trenches on Sewell Mountain. — Clint Johnson

I didn't say what I said to be controversial just because most people are picking the Patriots to win. I consider myself a pretty good judge of talent when it comes to defensive linemen and the Panthers' biggest strength is their defensive line. You win the battle of the trenches and that goes a long way to winning the game. — Warren Sapp

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning. — Jacqueline Winspear

I think credibility is one of those things that, if you work hard and you get it by standing in the trenches and traveling the world, people realize you're multi-faceted. Part of me is a serious journalist and I loved all of the stuff I did. And then there's another part of me that likes to let go and I think a lot of women can relate to that. — Hoda Kotb

Hell, no, I'm not sober. You think I'd be doing this shit if I were? And I notice I don't see your fat ass down here in the trenches so shut it before I forget I'm supposed to actually like you. (Syn) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I'm in the trenches; I do the best work I can always do. Having said that, the way that what I do converges with the outside world is fascinating to me. Because it ebbs and flows. People's interest and understanding, it changes all the time. — Daryl Hall

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood - a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth. — Seth Grahame-Smith

Put on a trench, you're suddenly Audrey Hepburn walking along the Seine. — Michael Kors

We started at once to dig our trenches, half of my platoon stepping forward abreast, the men being placed an arm's length apart. After laying their rifles down, barrels pointing to the enemy, a line was drawn behind the row of rifles and parallel to it. — Fritz Kreisler

When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that's a fallacy. The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can't understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints. If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity. — Ed Catmull

Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather's memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress. — Gunther Simmermacher

Politics, to a degree, is about legislation, administration. You can't be there in the trenches. — Diane Paulus

A hilarious academic novel that'll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom ... [A] mordant minor masterpiece ... Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts. — Maureen Corrigan

He was surprised at how angry he sounded -no, how angry he felt. Because it was impossible. It was impossible and unfair, and he had spent too many years in the trenches of unfairness to get riled up about it now. — Marissa Meyer

Change comes from dedicated, ordinary people, in the trenches, serving a cause greater than self. — Linda Bender

Only certain portions of the line had to undergo carnage in the French style, but knowledge of it was all-pervasive. Everything the 19th River Guard knew came from quiet meetings in the communications trenches, conversations with sleepless, bitter infantrymen who had been transferred up from the fiercer fighting in the south. If some of the River Guard were on the edge, many of the regular infantry had gone over it long before. Especially disturbing to the naval contingent were reports from down below that Italian troops now were shot quite casually for disciplinary reasons, and that the Italian generals, like their French counterparts, were executing men in decimations for crimes they had not committed. Men with families were pulled from the ranks along with equally mystified adolescents and put to death for acts attributed to others whom they had never seen. — Mark Helprin

Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads. — Fritz Kreisler

The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.'
Then I could read her thoughts and I knew what this day meant. Mrs. Abernathy's son could have been my dad. — Richard Peck

The crematorium could not burn the bodies fast enough - so after we dug long trenches, we pulled and dragged the bodies to the edges and threw them in. You'll not believe it, but the SS forced the prisoners' band to play music as we lugged the corpses - and for that, I hope they burn in hell with polkas blaring. — Mary Ann Shaffer

For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs. — James S.A. Corey

Why are so many of their faces disfigured, if you don't mind me asking? Is it the explosive shells they're using over there?" "I'm told it's the machine guns. Curious soldiers will often lift their heads out of the trenches, thinking they can dodge bullets in time, but there's no way they can possibly avoid the hail of machine-gun fire." She glanced over her shoulder. "We tend to also see several missing left arms because of the way they position themselves for shooting in the trenches. Their bones shatter into tiny fragments and their wristwatches become embedded in their wounds. There's no way to save the limbs. — Cat Winters

Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehovah may have witnessed on the day He created misogyny. The Cosmos kept its balance, though, because Everett was meanwhile leering the sort of testicular leer that Kali may well have had in mind when She inspired Man to create asbestos, carcinogenic beer, and the trenches in World War I. — David James Duncan

I do believe there's a heaven. I do believe that God has given me the resilience and the survival skills to withstand the chiffon trenches. — Andre Leon Talley

On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth. — Michael Foreman

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live. — Eric Burdon

What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather
who happened to be my mother and father
both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us? — Ali Smith

I started down the walkway. Two vampires vaulted out of the trenches in front of me, fangs bared. Oh look, it's a party and everybody is invited. Good. I liked parties. — Ilona Andrews

If Israel sent the IDF three kilometers into Lebanon and started digging trenches and building bunkers it would make news all over the world. But Syria does it and everyone shrugs. Hardly anyone even knows it happened at all. — Michael Totten

The End of World War One
Out of the scraped surface of the land
men began to emerge, like puppies
from the slit of their dam. Up from the trenches
they came out upon the pitted, raw earth
wobbling as if new-born.
They could not believe they would be allowed to live,
the orders had come down: no more killing.
They approached the enemy, holding out chocolate
and cigarettes. They shook hands, exchanged
souvenirs
mess-kits, neckerchiefs.
Some even embraced, while in London
total strangers copulated
in doorways and on the pavement, in the ecstasy
of being reprieved. Nine months later,
like men emerging from the trenches, first the head,
then the body, there were lifted, newborn, from these mothers,
the soldiers of World War Two. — Sharon Olds

Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches. — Henry Rollins

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. — Philip Zaleski

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents. — China Mieville

and ammunition for the great attack meant Alex was kept busy. Miles and miles more trenches spread tentacles across the ruined countryside. Ammunition dumps proliferated, and riding schools and training camps sprang up where there had once been fields. At the beginning of a dull, damp February, Alex caught a cold that turned into a raging fever. He spent a week in hospital, then was given a few days leave and told to get his strength back before returning to his company. Rose was delighted when he wrote to tell her he was staying at a guest house near Harfoix, and had asked the owner if his femme could come and stay. — Margaret James

They say that it is always poets that die in wars, and I never got over a sense of being in the trenches. — Salena Godden

If someone already knows you from being in the trenches with you on this TV schedules, and then you have a little bit more time, it's a treat for them, as well, because they can give you more. — Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

Nice hair.' Olivier turned to Clara, hoping to break the tension.
'Thank you.' Clara ran her hands through it, making it stand on end as though she'd just had a scare.
'You're right.' Olivier turned to Myrna. 'She looks like a frightened doughboy from the trenches of Vimy. Not many people could carry off that look. Very bold, very new millennium. I salute you.'
Clara narrowed her eyes and glared at Myrna whose smile went from ear to ear. — Louise Penny

You can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn't the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again. — Henry Miller

She believed in public service; she felt she had to roll up her sleeves and do something useful for the war effort. She organized a Comfort Circle, which collected money through rummage sales. This was spent on small boxes containing tobacco and candies, which were sent off to the trenches. She threw open Avilion for these functions, which (said Reenie) was hard on the floors. In addition to the rummage sales, every Tuesday afternoon her group knitted for the troops, in the drawing room
washcloths for the beginners, scarves for the intermediates, balaclavas and gloves for the experts. Soon another battalion of recruits was added, on Thursdays
older, less literate women from south of the Jogues who could knit in their sleep. These made baby garments for the Armenians, said to be starving, and for something called Overseas Refugees. After two hours of knitting, a frugal tea was served in the dining room, with Tristan and Iseult looking wanly down. — Margaret Atwood

All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault. — Paul Von Hindenburg

If we lose the war, our creditors - mainly Americans - will go bankrupt. And if we win, we'll make the Germans pay. 'Reparations' is the word they use." "How will they manage it?" "They will starve. But nobody cares what happens to the losers. Anyway, the Germans did the same to the French in 1871." He stood up and put his cup in the kitchen sink. "So you see why we can't make peace with Germany. Who then would pay the bill?" Ethel was aghast. "And so we have to keep sending boys to die in the trenches. Because we can't pay the bill. Poor Billy. What a wicked world we live in." "But — Ken Follett

The classroom - not the trench - is the frontier of freedom now and forevermore. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Spiritual growth thrives in the midst of our problems, not in their absence. Spiritual growth occurs in the trenches of life, not in the classroom. — Mike Yaconelli

I'm not in the Lifetime Achievement area yet-I'm still battling it out in the trenches. — Michael Caine

Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods. — Michael Winter

How, in good conscience," Alessandro asked, "can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches?" "Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches." "Everyone doesn't have the privilege. You do because you're a field marshal in command of a microscopic unit." "I realize that," Strassnitzky answered, "and, given such a rare opportunity, of which most men cannot even dream, I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to seize it, would I not? I exploit it to the full. — Mark Helprin

If you take a wrong step but you're still in that football position, you can just react and change directions. I think for the most part young guys need to work on their football position. Get in their stance and hold it as long as possible. Work on your flexibility, especially in the hips, so you can hold that longer. A good football position will help you be more mobile and give you better leverage in the trenches. — Brandon Spikes

Always waiting, waiting to go up to the front line, waiting in the trenches with the whizzbags and shells bursting all around you, waiting for the whistle to send you out over the top and across No-Man's-Land, waiting for the bullet that had name on it. — Michael Morpurgo

It is impossible to study the works of the great mathematicians, or even those of the lesser, without noticing and distinguishing two opposite tendencies, or rather two entirely different kinds of minds. The one sort are above all preoccupied with logic; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The other sort are guided by intuition and at the first stroke make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.
[1913, p210] — Henri Poincare

While the high-level climate talks pursue their stately progress towards some ill-defined destination, down in the trenches there is an undercurrent of suppressed panic in the conversations. The tipping points seem to be racing towards us a lot faster than people thought. — Gwynne Dyer

We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the sky yonder, - it had been a terrible world and life a burden. Now it is over and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. - Who can realize it? — Erich Maria Remarque

I will gladly shell out $24.95 or $9.99 or 99 cents on iTunes to read or see or listen to the 24-karat treasure that you have refined from your pain and your vision and your imagination. I need it. We all do. We're struggling here in the trenches. That beauty, that wisdom, those thrills and chills, even that mindless escape on a rainy October afternoon - I want it. Put me down for it. — Steven Pressfield

If you look at most successful startups, they're run by people in their mid to late forties, who've gone through the trenches multiple times and had multiple failures, so they understand. — Tony Fadell

It happened, you see, after the war, when I saw people making money while the others were dying in the trenches. You saw it and you couldn't do anything about it. Then later I was at the League of Nations, and there I saw the light. I really saw the world was ruled by the Golden Calf, by Mammon! Oh, no kidding! Implacably. Social consciousness certainly came to me late. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

A glimpse
of my feathers.
Show too much and they'll tear you apart
Bird of Paradise
Born in the trenches
Facing the mouth of a gun. — Emily Bird

Have we this day grace enough to make trenches into which the divine blessing may flow? Alas! we too often fail in the exhibition of true and practical faith. Let us this day be on the outlook for answers to prayer. As the child who went to a meeting to pray for rain took an umbrella with her, so let us truly and practically expect the Lord to bless us. Let us make the valley full of ditches and expect to see them all filled. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks - shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus - scalding, choking, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave - there are no other possibilities. — Erich Maria Remarque

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy. — James Hillman

Suicide in the trenches:
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
* * * * *
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go. — Siegfried Sassoon

Only my penis is still free and happy, no good for sword fights and no good for any work, or even for hanging things on, or for digging trenches. Praise be to God that it is so. — Yehuda Amichai

Yea ! by your works are ye justified
toil unrelieved ;
Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ;
Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ;
Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ;
Courage that suns
Only foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns. — Gilbert Frankau

During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life ... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong - for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. — Orson Scott Card

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

I'm hardly digging trenches for a living. I'm getting to tap into my boyhood fantasies of being a larger-than-life character. — Joel Edgerton

It's easy to lose sight of the ultimate goal when you're in the trenches. — Tony Dungy

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start. — Brian Skerry

Those who've left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies' wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand. — Bruce Crown

But Einstein was not the best mathematician around, and others, undeterred by neither the difficulty of the equations nor the war that was ravaging Europe (this was 1916), were able to find solutions. Some of the most important solutions ever found - those that describe the gravitational fields of stars and black holes - were written down by a German officer named Karl Schwarzchild as he lay dying in a field hospital of a skin disease he had picked up in the trenches. — Lee Smolin

I think a generation ago, dads went to work, they came home, and they had their dinner, had a drink, and then went to bed. I don't know what it was like in your house, but that is how it was in mine. I think it is cool to have the dads in the trenches and doing the real parenting work. — Zach Cregger

...I found that much of the romance had left the trenches. The old days, from the beginning to July, 1915, were all so delightfully precarious and primitive. Amateurish trenches and rough and ready life, which to my mind gave this war what it sadly needs - a touch of romance. — Bruce Bairnsfather

We have fallen through the surface and are deep in the trenches of need — David Levithan

There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like ... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. — Demosthenes

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day- to- day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches. — Alain De Botton

The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up. — Michael Winter

Performance-wise, you really need to be down in the trenches; you need to do the hard work, for a lot of reasons: To build yourself as a performer, to get a sense of the audience, to work hard and to wonder, 'Do I really want to do this?' — Joan Jett

Ironically, the memory of the women heroes of World War I was largely eclipsed by the very women they had inspired. The more blatant evil enacted into law by Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that those who fought against it would continue to fascinate long after the first war had become a vague, unpleasant memory - one brought to mind only by fading photographs of serious, helmeted young men standing in sandbagged trenches or smiling young women in ankle-length nursing uniforms, or by the presence of poppies in Remembrance Day ceremonies. — Kathryn J. Atwood

When I watch professional football, I love listening to John Madden because I know he knows what he's talking about. He's been both down in the trenches and in front of the bench as a coach. He knows the game. — Robert Kiyosaki

On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men. — Armando Valladares

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 women and the other men
for the love of all that is good and true
they keep themselves together because they have to. They are afraid but they are not cowards. — Elena Mauli Shapiro

The heroes of obtrusiveness, people with whom no soldier would lie down in the trenches, though he has to submit to being interviewed by them, break into recently abandoned royal castles so that they can report, "We got there first!" It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them. — Karl Kraus

I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change. I am far lazier than that. — Jon Stewart