War Language Quotes & Sayings

and he became a communist. He was court-martialed but allowed to resign from the army. In the revolutions of 1848 he fought to overthrow his king and, failing, fled to America. There he became first a carpenter and then the editor of a German-language newspaper in Cincinnati with a slant so leftist he earned the nickname "Reddest of the Red." When the Civil War came, Willich recruited fifteen hundred Cincinnati Germans within a matter of hours and helped organize the Ninth Ohio-now marching with the XIV Corps. — Steven E. Woodworth

America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice. — Thomas Paine

We are facing an external attack against us, which is more dangerous than any other previous wars ... We are dealing with those who are extremists, who only know the language of killing and criminality. — Bashar Al-Assad

This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache. — Alice McDermott

There's something retro about your persona. It's like the pre-World War II generation of reporters - those unpretentious, working-class guys who hung around saloons and used rough language. Now they've all been replaced with these effete Ivy League elitists who swarm over the current media. Nerds - utterly dull and insipid. — Camille Paglia

Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he'd lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others. — James W. Pennebaker

Though her grasp of English was modest and his Italian non-existent, their rapport was at once intuitive and intimate, founded more on physical attraction and a shared love of the outdoors than meaningful conversation. — Robert Radcliffe

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. — Mark John Thompson

It was then that he started his novel The People Immortal, and when I read it later, many of its pages seemed to me very familiar. He found himself as a writer during the war. His pre-war books were nothing more than searching for his theme and language. He was a true internationalist and reproached me frequently for saying "Germans" instead of "Hitler's men" when describing the atrocities of the occupiers.' Ehrenburg was persuaded that it was Grossman's all-embracing world view which made the xenophobic Stalin hate him. — Vasily Grossman

...Religious observances, once so full of suffering and awe, have become accommodating and benign. Teachers go out of their way to avoid embarrassing, insulting, overworking, or otherwise vexing their students. Each year public language is further purged of impurities that might injure sensitive groups. Prime-time television series seem dedicated to the comforting message that things are really okay.
Indeed, modern society's war on pain has been vastly more successful than its war on pain's causes. — Robert Grudin

Language is a powerful thing, and it changes the way we view ourselves, and other people, in delightful and horrifying ways. Anyone with any knowledge of the military, or who pays attention to how the media talks about war, has likely caught on to this.
We don't kill "people." We kill "targets." (Or japs or gooks or ragheads). We don't kill "fifteen year old boys" but "enemy combatants" (yes, every boy 15 and over killed in drone strikes now is automatically listed as an enemy combatant. Not a boy. Not a child.). — Kameron Hurley

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war? — Gloria E. Anzaldua

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. — Jean H. Baker

He wonders by what process virtually any discussion about the war seems to profane these ultimate matters of life and death. As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody's always talking about. They want it to be easy and it's just not going to be. — Ben Fountain

Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over. — Arthur Koestler

The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Iraqis the typical 19 year old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying Americas good will, he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance. — Dexter Filkins

It just seemed to me so utterly wrong to credit someone's work just for the fact that this someone migrated from one place to another. We all move. We are all leavers and new beginners at some point, and yes, it is a huge leap from war to peace, from one language to another, from Boston, MA to Joplin, MO. — Sasa Stanisic

In the end, after advice from the Foreign Office, she decided make a three-day visit to Bosnia, still slowly recovering from civil war, in the company of the distinguished journalist Lord Deedes. He recalled not only her gentle sense of humour but her ability to listen and to communicate the uncommunicable. When she walked around Sarajevo's largest cemetery she encountered a mother tending her son's grave. 'There was no language barrier,' he wrote. 'The two women gently embraced. Watched this scene from a distance, I sought in my mind who else could have done this. Nobody. — Andrew Morton

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation. — Abigail Disney

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use 'beautiful' to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now - clear and precise. Humble like dreams. — Jess Walter

No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus "mass murder" becomes "the final solution," "world domination" becomes "defending the free world," the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and "ecocide" becomes "developing natural resources." No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves - and to make our own decisions. — Derrick Jensen

political environment. But there is always a thin line between a peaceful election and armed conflict. We acknowledge this close relationship in the way we use martial jargon to discuss our politics. Candidates battle for states, campaigns are run from war rooms, commercials are part of a media blitz, and campaign volunteers are foot soldiers. "Politics," the Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz said, "is the womb in which war develops." Violent conflict is born out in other nations where the martial language of politics is not metaphorical. In the same year that McCain and Obama — Scott Farris

The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies. — Dean Koontz

Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation. — Winifred Holtby

Well, the movie isn't bad. For a while, I even told myself I liked it, even as it missed one mark after another. But in the end, it's shapeless and blandly apolitical, apart from its watered-down feminism. You see, Fey's Kim Baker - changed from Barker - transforms herself from a neophyte reporter, condescended to by male war correspondents, soldiers and Afghan officials, into a hard-charging political animal who speaks the language fluently and parties as hard as men. That's about as edgy as a sitcom. — David Edelstein

To the guards who walked up and down outside, each car became a single organism which ate and drank and excreted through its ventilators. It talked or sometimes yelled through its ventilators, too. In went water and loaves of blackbread and sausage and cheese, and out came shit and piss and language. — Kurt Vonnegut

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction. — Zachary Mason

Our people... blood is the only language we speak. I'm all out of words. — Kurtis J. Wiebe

J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered - as it still is in many quarters - an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere "escapism." "Of course it is escapist," he cried. "That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape - and take as many with him as he can." He went on to explain, "The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible. — Stephen R. Lawhead

She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now
even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough. — Helen Oyeyemi

waging war against inane language that circulates almost automatically is a writer's eternal mission, and the day will never come when this battles are unnecessary. — Minae Mizumura

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable. — Toni Morrison

The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe, did not really want to win.

The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it. — Alanna Mitchell

After invoking the language and symbols of religion to bypass reason and convince the country to go to war, Bush found it increasingly necessary to disdain and dispute inconvenient facts that began to surface in public discussions. He sometimes seemed to wage war against reason itself in his effort to deny obvious truths that were totally inconsistent with the false impressions the nation had been given prior to making the decision to invade. He and his team seemed to approach every question of fact as a partisan fight to the finish. Those who questioned the faulty assumptions on which the war was based were attacked as unpatriotic. Those who pointed to the forged evidence and glaring inconsistencies were accused of supporting terrorism. One of Bush's congressional allies, John Boehner, then House majority leader, said, If you want to let the terrorists win in Iraq, just vote for the Democrats. — Al Gore

For example, an author whose parents fled a war but he himself was born in the country where they fled to, and that is where he went to school and college before he wrote his first book of poetry in the language of this country - he should be labeled as: "Author whose parents fled a war but he himself was born in the country where they fled to, and that is where he went to school and college before he wrote his first book of poetry in the language of this country." — Sasa Stanisic

What's happening is the language. Not only in the usual sense of being interesting (which it is), but in the new sense that words are events, as real and important in themselves as wars and lovers ... It is to the word, then, that the mind moves, and the word responds by taking on a physicality, even a sensuality, we have all been trained to ignore. Words have weight, and the distance between two can be a chasm filled with forces of association ... What Clark is doing is genuinely new. — Ron Silliman

The United States Navy, during the war, used Navajos as "code-talkers" who relayed messages from ship to ship, talking in Navajo (a language not studied in Japan). — Michael Lesk

I dislike Tolkien, another Oxonian Old Norse obsessive, with his war games and made-up language in a world without women. — Sarah Moss

We were the lucky ones, the notthese, we were the ones who had survived the aerial bombing and fire-clusters, the final flash. Regrettable, unavoidable, a war to end all wars, a war for democracy, a war for freedom, peaceful war. Sometimes war is necessary. Sometimes war is right.
But to the broken and the dead, to the wounded and the maimed, to the exploded and the shrapnelshattered, to minds gone dark, to eyes that have seen agony no tears can wash away, it hardly matters that the dead language of war repeats itself through time. The bodies that can say nothing have the last word.
What is it - the last word? No.
No more war. — Jeanette Winterson

War of the Worlds is rated PG-13. Much of the earth's population is wiped out, leaving very little time for sex or bad language. — A.O. Scott

When the enemy's envoy's speak in humble terms, but continues his preparations, he will advance. When their language is deceptive but the enemy pretentiously advances, he will retreat. When the envoys speak in apologetic terms, he wishes a respite. When without a previous understanding the enemy asks for a truce, he is plotting. When the enemy sees an advantage but does not advance to seize it, he is fatigued. — Sun Tzu

It was as much a battle of wits and words as it was of mitts and swords. — Dean F. Wilson

I look out on my language, two days later
A short absence is enough
for Aeschylus to open the door to peace
a short speech is enough
for Antonio to incite war
A hand of a woman in my hand
is enough
to embrace my freedom
and for the ebb and flow to begin anew in my body
(I See my Ghost Coming from a Distance) — Mahmoud Darwish

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years. — Douglas Coupland

Fierce language and pretentious advances are signs that the enemy is about to retreat. — Sun Tzu

The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy. — Arthur Koestler

They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different color uniform and speaks a different language? — Michael Morpurgo

The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war." "Language, Elayne." "My apologies," she said after another sip of vodka. "One gets carried away when one feels one's dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error." * — Max Gladstone

But I won't watch them go to war again. I've been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we'd saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed down their throats. — Richard K. Morgan

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so. — James Branch Cabell

Holy shadows of the dead, I am not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people to fight one another. I do not feel happy for this victory of mine. On the contrary, I would be glad, brothers, if I had all of you standing here next to me, since we are united by the same language, the same blood and the same visions.
[Addressing the dead Hellenes of the Battle of Chaeronea] — Alexander The Great

I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the world. I blaze with a deep southern magic. The bombardiers taxi at noon. There is screaming and grief in the mansions and the moon is a heron on fire. — Pat Conroy

My journalistic mission was straightforward: to await the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Nobody knew quite when this would be. But the diplomacy - the meetings in the U.N. security council, the allegations about weapons of mass destruction, the martial language of Tony Blair and George W. Bush - all suggested a war was brewing. — Luke Harding

What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans. — Chris Hedges

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we. — Andrew Smith

One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl's legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, "May you bloom." The girl doesn't flinch. The widow tells her, "This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne. When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women, who are connected to all of nature." The girl asks, "Why is it the word ne?" The widow responds, "When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman's body to men." The widow places her hands into the water and says, "Good. You are alive. You and I are alive. — Lidia Yuknavitch

The '60s were a very turbulent time for colored people. Being away at war was a chance for them to escape the racial bullshit for a while. It was a shame it came down to that kind of choice.
Don't get me wrong. There were plenty of guys, who tried to bring that racial crap over there with them. However, when the shit hits the fan, you don't give a damn about who's standing next to you, saving your ass. You certainly don't care what color his skin is or what language he speaks. All that matters to you is that he is an American G.I. Government Issued, baby! — Jason Medina

The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life. — Simon S. Tam

How is this any different than the big boat argument of people when it came to African-Americans after the Civil War, decided, 'Put them on a boat and send them back where they came from?' You know, he says it in polite language, but that's what Romney's been saying, 'Get home where you came from, start all over again.' — Chris Matthews

We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom. — Slavoj Zizek

It's the Poverty.

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word's length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster's words. — Cherrie L. Moraga

That your power of command
with simple language was
one of the magnificent things of
our century.
(from the poem: result) — Charles Bukowski

Look into the face of a man who will kill you for a belief and your nostrils will snuff up the scent of abomination. Hear a speech declaring a holy war and, I assure you, your ears should catch the clink of evil's scales and the dragging of its monstrous tail over the purity of the language. — Terry Pratchett

The genes supply the motivation for warfare, [E. O.] Wilson is saying, in humans as they do in chimps, but people, blessed with the power of language, look for some objective cause of war. A society psychs itself up to go to war by agreeing that their neighbors have wronged them, whether by seizing property or failing to deliver on some promise. Religious leaders confirm that the local deity favors their cause and off go the troops. — Nicholas Wade

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.) — Bill Bryson

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German. — Philip K. Dick

New York doesn't exactly have neighborhoods, the way most cities do. What it has is closer to distinct and separate villages, some of them existing on different continents, some of them existing in different centuries, and many of them at war with one another. English is not the primary language in many of these villages, but the Roman alphabet does still have a slight edge. — Donald E. Westlake

Now you listen to me," says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. "You've given birth to two children and quite soon will be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now ... I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well." And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he'll ever give her. "Because you are not a complete twit. — Fredrik Backman

My mom and dad refused to believe that people who had grown up together in peace and friendship, had gone to the same schools, spoken the same language, and listened to the same music, could overnight be blinded by ethnic hatred and start to brutally kill one another. They simply didn't accept as true that less than two years of a multiparty system and competition for power could poison people's brains so much. — Savo Heleta

An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements - the animals that we call men - will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear. And yet armies are not built on fear. The Tsar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. In his attempt to save it by restoring the death-penalty, Kerensky only finished it. Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. These facts demand no explanation for any one who has even the slightest knowledge of the language of history. The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution, and the train supplied the front with this cement. — Leon Trotsky

Brian Turner writes as only a soldier can, of terror and compassion, hurt and horror, sympathy and desire. He takes us into the truth and trauma of the Iraq war in language that is precise, delicate and beautiful, even as it tells of a suicide bomber, a skull shattered by a bullet, a blade in a bloodgroove. — Andrew Himes

War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood

When a Muslim becomes a Christian, he or she is radical in their faith. The cost to serve Jesus is high, but there is so much joy and freedom in choosing Him that even if it costs you your life, the reward far outweighs the sacrifice. My sisters and I would wake at 4:00 a.m. to run to the prayer meeting, praying in heavenly language the whole way for our safety. Nothing would stop us - not rain, snow or war. We went because we loved to be free in the presence of God while at home we had to hide our faith. Our mother knew where we were going, but our father and brothers had no idea. They woke up early to go to work and assumed we were still asleep in our beds. — Samaa Habib

I tell you, my friends,' he said one day. 'I tell you that I am the only sane man in the regiment. It's the others that are mad, but they don't know it. They fight a war and they don't know what for. Isn't that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language? And it's me they call mad! — Michael Morpurgo

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. *** The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand - on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo? — Kurt Vonnegut

If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done. — Jim Wallis

I grew up a really nerdy kid. I read science fiction and fantasy voraciously, for the first 16 years of my life. I read a lot of classic Cold War science fiction, which is much of the best science fiction, so I speak the language well, which is a commodity that's not easy to come by in Hollywood. — Jon Spaihts

The great chandeliers hang silent. The tables in the vast dining room overlooking the lake are spread with white cloth and silver as if for dinners before the war. At a little after 4, into the green room with the slow walk of aged people, the Nabokovs come. He wears a navy blue cardigan, a blue-checked shirt, gray slacks and a tie. His shoes have crepe soles. He is balding, with a fringe of gray hair. His hazel-green eyes are watering, oysterous, as he says. He is 75, born on the same day as Shakespeare, April 23. He is at the end of a great career, a career half-carved out of a language not his own. — James Salter

No, I'm saying those Yankees are messing things up again. No respectable Southern woman would ever say a girl was Rosewell's 'power mower.' For heaven's sake. That's ridiculous. But those Yankees have tin ears. On language alone we should have won the war." She looked at us. "The woman called that floozy his paramour. But some Yankee messed it up. Paramour. Power mower. You hear the difference?" Wally glanced at me. She was — Sibella Giorello

He told me that once, in the war, he'd come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn't speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier's head. He didn't do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another. — Libba Bray

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them
was hurt or molested by our band. ( ... )
The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon
their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and
we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect
their property.
How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right
look like wrong, and wrong like right. — Black Hawk

Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain. — Kerstin Gier

When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell! — William Halsey

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

We do not war with races primarily as such. Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment, under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man. — Winston Churchill

I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails. — Steve Erickson

We are Americans, speaking the same language, adopting the same customs, holding the same general opinions ... and shall rise and fall with Americans. — Frederick Douglass

Every other man spoke a language entirely his own, which he had figured out by private thinking; he had his own ideas and peculiar ways. If you wanted to talk about a glass of water, you had to start back with God creating the heavens and earth; the apple; Abraham; Moses and Jesus; Rome; the Middle Ages; gunpowder; the Revolution; back to Newton; up to Einstein; then war and Lenin and Hitler. After reviewing this and getting it all straight again you could proceed to talk about a glass of water. "I'm fainting, please get me a little water." You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood. — Saul Bellow

I guess that isn't the right word, she said. She was used to apologizing for her use of language. She had been encouraged to do a lot of that in school. Most white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept their sentences short and their words simple, in order to keep embarrassing mistakes to a minimum. Dwayne certainly did that. Patty certainly did that.
This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. — Kurt Vonnegut

Freeman looked up and grinned. "Karl, this author is American and plainly loves twisted language. Listen: 'The idiot god Azathoth, that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity.' Superb nonsense." Karl snorted. "Why are you reading such stuff?" "It's a novel of horror. Seems appropriate in a war, somehow." Karl — Gregory Benford

More than ever, I feel that the human race is one. There are differences of colour, language, culture and opportunities, but people's feelings and reactions are alike. People flee wars to escape death, they migrate to improve their fortunes, they build new lives in foreign lands, they adapt to extreme hardship ... . — Sebastiao Salgado

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. — Jared Diamond

All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95 percent of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's just the same fraction as those African Americans, almost all of them slaves, who were illiterate just before the Civil War - when severe penalties were in force for anyone who taught a slave to read. Of course there's a degree of arbitrariness about any determination of illiteracy, whether it applies to language or to science. But anything like 95 percent illiteracy is extremely serious. — Carl Sagan

The fact that in the twentieth century a greater proportion of the people in the world could communicate with one another, using English or just a few other languages, appears not to have stopped any wars, nor to have reduced the frequency with which wars have broken out, nor to have made the wars that have broken out less brutal. In fact, several murderous wars have been fought recently among people who speak 'the same language' in real terms. — Andrew Dalby

By my count, of the more than 600 English-language World War II movies made since 1940, only four have even acknowledged the humanity of the soldiers of Nippon. There may be a few I've missed, but not many. — Stephen Hunter

Sport, which mimics the language and emotional intensity of war but eliminates
the fatal destruction, may be a form of redemption. — Ed Ayres

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. — Thomas Paine