War Correspondent Quotes & Sayings

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken. — P. J. O'Rourke

I could scarcely believe that my new home was engulfed by war before I even had time to find an apartment. It seemed that war followed me everywhere I went. — Richard Engel

A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats. — Harold Holzer

I may have been in stage four, but I wasn't completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out. — Richard Engel

I have to admit that the empty prestige and the stupid glory - yes, the horrible rush, the deadly sense of importance that war brings to life - are hard illusions to shake off. Look at me, a war correspondent. — Michael Hastings

The bombing started up again, with explosions all around us, in broad daylight, but no one in the restaurant even flinched. Iraqis seemed numb after a quarter century under Saddam's whip-hand rule. It was heartbreaking to see what a harsh dictatorship can do to the human soul. In less than a week, I had grown almost inured to explosions and fires. — Richard Engel

As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get. — Asne Seierstad

We were meat to be bought and sold. Speaking Arabic made me a curious and unusual product. I didn't want to be special. I didn't want them to be curious about me. — Richard Engel

He asked us what we were doing, and our smuggler said, "Oh, nothing. We're just hanging out" - as if lots of Americans in ninja suits loitered around Syria in the middle of the afternoon. We asked him if he had a cell phone. He didn't, which meant we had twenty or thirty minutes to get back across the Turkish border. — Richard Engel

Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things. — Asne Seierstad

My father was a little frightening - a huge man, six foot four - and he looked like God. He was always a visitor, as far as I was concerned, because my parents separated when I was nine. We only became friends when he was old and began to shrink. During the war, he was a BBC war correspondent and did some extraordinary broadcasts. — Jennifer Johnston

A private should preserve a respectful attitude toward his superiors, and should seldom or never proceed so far as to offer suggestions to his general in the field. If the battle is not being conducted to suit him, it is better for him to resign. By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field. — Mark Twain

If I could order any drink I wanted now, it would be a Sweet Rob Roy on the Rocks, a Manhattan made with Scotch. That was another drink a woman introduced me to, and it made me laugh instead of cry, and fall in love with the woman who said to try one. That was in Manila, after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Saigon. She was Harriet Gummer, the war correspondent from Iowa. She had a son by me without telling me. His name? Rob Roy. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Then someone cried out, "Suicide bomber!" The crowd panicked. In the ensuing stampede, terrified pilgrims ran in both directions, many colliding in the middle of the bridge. A side railing collapsed under their weight, and scores leaped into the water whether they could swim or not. Hundreds were trampled to death. More than a thousand died. Hundreds of pairs of sandals were scattered around the bridge, left behind when pilgrims made their desperate dives into the river. I was given all of seventy-five seconds to tell the story on the Nightly News. — Richard Engel

Kelly was starting to have serious second thoughts about the whole assignment. Like all war correspondents, she supposed. Being on the ground was very different to sitting in the office anticipating being on the ground. Especially with the appearance of that red cloud. — Peter F. Hamilton

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner. — Robert Capa

As a war correspondent and a mother, I've learned to live in two different realities ... but it's my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war - to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty. — Lynsey Addario

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent. — Anthony Shadid

What the fuck? Didn't you tell him you had a boyfriend?" "I did. He asked if I loved you." "Who is this guy? What's he do?" "He's an accountant in Boston." "An accountant? Jesus Christ, didn't you tell him you're dating a fucking war correspondent? — Michael Hastings

When I take risks now, I do so only when I have to and with every precaution. I used to prospect for news, dropping into places to see what was up. Well, I could go to parts of Libya today and find lots of good stories, but I probably wouldn't be around to tell them. — Richard Engel

I had a direct experience of the efficacy of this form of mind-body medicine. This comes from somebody who had been sort of an alpha male, highly cynical war correspondent, who had basically seen it all and heard it all, was cynical and trusted nothing. — Brad Willis

Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you're Superman, invincible. In the second, you're aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you're going to die because you've played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three. — Richard Engel

My role [as a war correspondent] is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless [and] to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. — Janine Di Giovanni

The "herrenvolk" [master race] are all around you, threading their way on their bicycles between the piles of rubble or rushing off with jugs and buckets to meet the water cart. It is queer to think that these are the people who once ruled Europe, from the Channel to the Caspian Sea and might have conquered our own island, if they had known how weak we were. — George Orwell

From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty - print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. "Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?" he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means "steadfast" and "brave" and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder. — Richard Engel

I was planning, I told everybody, to take him on the road with me. At the very least I fully expected to keep up my hectic pace, and my passion as a war correspondent. — Christiane Amanpour

I was a war correspondent. I've watched great people crumble under pressure and make bad decisions. — Peter Landesman

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.' — David Douglas Duncan

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die. — Oriana Fallaci

In 2015, when I went back to the States or to an international conference, I found that people didn't much care anymore. They saw the Middle East awash in blood, beyond redemption, and didn't want to read about it or see it on the evening news. They just wanted to keep away from it. — Richard Engel

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative. — Geraldine Brooks

My four years in Russia end, then, in dramatic fashion: with a textbook Soviet-style expulsion. I am the first western staff correspondent to suffer this fate since the end of the Cold War. I'm stunned. But my expulsion is not, I reflect, a surprise. It's something I have always accepted as a real, if far-fetched, possibility. — Luke Harding

When you're a war correspondent, the reader is for you because the reader is saying, 'Gee, I wouldn't want to be doing that.' They're on your side. — P. J. O'Rourke

I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire. — Robert Fisk

To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say thay Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent. — Deborah Levy

I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan. — Peter Landesman

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture. — Robert Capa

It wasn't something I started off in my teens or early twenties thinking I want to be a war correspondent. I still don't think of myself as a war correspondent. I'm not. I'm a foreign correspondent. — Stephen Farrell

'Acting as if ... ' I decided, ridiculously in retrospect, that my experience covering women's volleyball for my college newspaper was sufficient for me to at least try to become a war correspondent. — Samantha Power

The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. — Robert Capa

war correspondent — Lynne Olson

Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11: 00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work. — Richard Engel