War Widows Quotes & Sayings

There was an inexhaustible source of clouds in some land far to the north. Decisive people, minds fixed on the task, clothed in thick, gray uniforms, working silently from morning to night to make clouds, like bees make honey, spiders make webs, and war makes widows. — Haruki Murakami

Greatness has its beauties, but only in retrospect and in the imagination: thus wrote General Bonaparte to General Moreau in 1800. His observation helps to explain why the world, only a few years after sighing with relief at its delivery from the ogre, began to worship him as the greatest man of modern times. Napoleon had barely left the scene when the fifteen years that he had carved out of world history to create his glory seemed scarcely believable. Only the scars of the war veterans and the empty places in the widows' beds seemed to attest to the reality of those years, and time soon eliminated even these silent witnesses. What remained, in retrospect and in the imagination, was legend and symbol. — J. Christopher Herold

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses. — Daniel Berrigan

Drones are sort of the perfect weapon for a country that doesn't want to go to war. It only - there's no fingerprint. There's no direct involvement. There's human beings killed on the other end. You never see them. You don't have to worry about them. You don't have to meet their widows. It's sort of an antiseptic warfare. — Mark Shields

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe. — Adrienne Rich

It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men. — Allan Gurganus

When I went to Afghanistan in 2003, I walked into a war zone. Entire neighborhoods had been demolished. There were an overwhelming number of widows and orphans and people who had been physically and emotionally damaged; every 10-year-old kid on the street knew how to dismantle a Kalashnikov in under a minute. I would flip through math textbooks intended for third grade, fourth grade, and they would include word problems such as, "If you have 100 grenades and 20 mujahideen, how many grenades per mujahideen do you get?" War has infiltrated every facet of life. — Khaled Hosseini

Care for him who shall have borne the battle — Abraham Lincoln

When after many battles past,
Both tir'd with blows,
make peace at last,
What is it, after all, the people get?
Why! taxes, widows, wooden legs, and debt. — Francis Daniels Moore

By 1865, all Southern women - the happily and regrettably single, the perpetually engaged, the wives and widows - had tired of the war. The Confederacy was shrinking, and the morale of its remaining men shrinking with it. — Karen Abbott

They came back
To widows,
To fatherless children,
To screams, to sobbing.
The men came back
As little clay jars
Full of sharp cinders. — Aeschylus

In times of war, you often hear leaders - Christian, Jewish, and Muslim - saying, 'God is on our side.' But that isn't true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans. — Greg Mortenson

They call war an art, but it isn't. It largely consists in outwitting people, robbing widows and orphans, and inflicting suffering on the helpless for one's own ends - and that's not art: that's business. — Kenneth Roberts

War I abhor, and yet how sweet The sound along the marching street Of drum and fife, and I forget Wet eyes of widows, and forget Broken old mothers, and the whole Dark butchery without a soul. — Seneca The Younger

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows. — Paddy Chayefsky

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. — Martin Luther King Jr.

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades. — Paddy Chayefsky

Women are the victims of war ... as widows they've faced the trauma of being single parents and livelihoods of families are affected. A lot of gender-related problems come up in terms of health, education, domestic violence, etc. — Kumari Jayawardena

War - after all, what is it that the people get? Why-widows, taxes, wooden legs and debt. — Samuel B. Pettengill