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8d86507 "Like every thoughtful parent in every age of history, Neil consoled himself, "My generation failed, but this new one is going to change the entire world, and go piously to the polls even on rainy election-days, and never drink more than one cocktail, and end all war." -- generations politics social-good society voting war young-people Sinclair Lewis
60956d9 When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms. government hypocrisy war Sinclair Lewis
2013e68 We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering. politicians war zinn Howard Zinn
da3e701 So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war -- which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell -- seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively. retrospection war wwi Geoff Dyer
dd55ea1 sorry, luv, all is far in war/ war Jennifer L. Armentrout
b0b110a Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again. war Penelope Farmer
398ae15 Although war can bring with it great enthusiasm and solidarity, it also brings the reaction to these things. reactionary-politics solidarity war Christopher Hitchens
23066b3 An army is a strange masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite humanity, explained. war Victor Hugo
400af2f I hated him for making me stop hating him war Tim O'Brien
7e66bde See what's inside a drop of water. The whole seed of the universe. Come, come. See what's inside a drop of blood. The composition of life. It's all there. Hate as well. We approach the mystery of life, but it's impossible to understand the mystery of hate. The kind of hate that causes people not only to kill, but to want to erase you from the census of births. I have to concentrate on that mystery. Read everything there is. It has to be in a drop of blood. It has to have its chemistry. life war Manuel Rivas
ab52202 "Surviving war Margaret Atwood
fc17b77 I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.) lying politics war Tim O'Brien
37c714d In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement. journalist war world-war-2 ww2 Malcolm Lowry
bb56282 They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself. vietnam war Tim O'Brien
45a526d Kabul fell prey to men who looked like they had tumbled out of their mothers with Kalashnikov in hand... war war-lords Khaled Hosseini
6b20b59 "Do the people in this country approve of this war?" [...]. "Approve? You don't think we'd lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!" "But I mean the people, not the government. The... the people who must fight." "What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions. It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he's broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common soldier hs always been our greatest resource as a nation. It's how we became the leader we are." "By climbing up on a pile of dead children?" [...]. "No,"[...] "you'll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country's threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it's grand to see how people close ranks when the flag's in danger. You're unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, [...], is that it's womanish. It simply doesn't include the virile side of life. 'Blood and steel, battle's brightness,' as the old poet says. It doesn't understand courage--love of the flag." [...] "That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags." patriotism soldier war Ursula K. Le Guin
44778f3 There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth. dreams history vision war Mark Kurlansky
1b516cd I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified...all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain. psychology war Eric Ambler
da06534 Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama's approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from . The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory. obama-s-wars politics war Bob Woodward
07c589a I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio. reality war Tim O'Brien
00a3213 The heavy round face was looking at him, the hard look of a man who had also understood, who had seen all the stupidity, who knew, after all, that the gold stars were often mindless decoration, that the army was led not by symbols, but by the fallible egos and blind fantasies of men. war Jeff Shaara
6037b67 Wars, wars, wars': reading up on the region I came across one moment when quintessential Englishness had in fact intersected with this darkling plain. In 1906 Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for British colonies, had been honored by an invitation from Kaiser Wilhelm II to attend the annual maneuvers of the Imperial German Army, held at Breslau. The Kaiser was 'resplendent in the uniform of the White Silesian Cuirassiers' and his massed and regimented infantry... Strange to find Winston Churchill and Sylvia Plath both choosing the word 'roller,' in both its juggernaut and wavelike declensions, for that scene. british-empire british-overseas-territories cars cavalry churchill englishness german-army german-empire germany infantry kaiser kaiser-wilhelm-ii poetry silesia sylvia-plath upper-silesia war wrocław Christopher Hitchens
2a307d3 Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren't heroes. We were only there... war Robert Cormier
18b309b Agriculture makes people dependent on a few domesticated crops and animals instead of hundreds of wild food sources, creating vulnerability to droughts and blights and zoonotic diseases. Agriculture makes for sedentary living, leaving humans to do something that no primate with a concern for hygiene and public health would ever do: namely, living in close proximity to their feces. Agriculture makes for surplus and thus almost inevitably, the uneven distribution of surplus generating socio-economic status differences that dwarf anything that other primates cook up with their hierarchies. And from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump until we've got Mr. McGregor persecuting Peter Rabbit and people incessantly singing Oklahoma. hunter-gatherers inequality war Robert M. Sapolsky
d44e491 "Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was "This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy." That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory." war Joan Didion
e3841d0 Chamberlain raised his saber, let loose the shout that was the greatest sound he could make, boiling the yell up from his chest: Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! He leaped down from the boulder, still screaming, his voice beginning to to crack and give, and all around him his men were roaring animal screams, and he saw the whole Regiment rising and pouring over the wall and beginning to bound down through the dark bushes, over the dead and dying wounded, hats coming off, hair flying, mouths making sounds, one man firing as he ran, the last bullet, last round. civil-war civil-war-fiction drama gallantry history inspirational war warrior Michael Shaara
5ff69c3 "The haughty nephew ... and an even haughtier wife, both convinced that Germany was appointed by God to govern the world. Aunt July would come the next day, convinced that Great Britain had been appointed to the same post by the same authority. Were both these loud-voiced parties right? On one occasion they had met, and Margaret ... had implored them to argue the subject out in her presence. Whereat they blushed and began to talk about the weather. ... Margaret then remarked: "To me one of two things is very clear; either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God." A hateful little girl, but at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without perceiving." religion war E.M. Forster
9507d22 A daughter, a wife, a grandson,' You could say this place took away all I had. I could easily appear to be one of those unfortunate white men you hear about, who thought too lovingly of the other races and civilization of the world, who left his own country in the West to set up a home among them in the East, and was ruined as a result, paying dearly for his foolish mistake. His life smashed to pieces by the barbarians surrounding him. history war Nadeem Aslam
4005eb3 I've fought for and against pretty much every cause there is. There will always be war of some kind. At first it was over fertile soil and good water, then precious metal and then the most popular version of human disagreement, 'My God is better than your God.' Whether you draw your faith from Jeremiah and Jesus, Allah and Muhammad or Brahma and Buddha, it doesn't matter. Someone will tell you you're wrong, and he'll fight you over it. Me, I believe in aliens, and to hell with all earthly gods. In the grand scheme of a trillion planets in the universe we're just not that damn important anyway. And humans are rotten to the core. humans religion war David Baldacci
7ac42a2 When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated. history unending war Philippa Gregory
34dc357 I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128 interesting-facts war Donna Tartt
2214849 Ultimately, the claim goes to the strongest, does it not? In the final sort of things, I mean. He who remains alive, remains alive to write the histories in a light favorable to him and his cause. Surely as worldly as you are, you know well the histories of the world, Master Wingham. Surely you recognize that armies carrying banners are almost always thieves - until they win. history jarlaxle sellswords war R.A. Salvatore
0a995ba Fred's vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point. data-point death methane viscera war James S.A. Corey
087b8a5 My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus. artist switzerland war Tom Stoppard
a20bbb6 They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls. poetic-prose poetry sci-fi war Dan Simmons
99fa620 The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. confederacy georgia good-negro-government race theories-of-race us-civil-war war white-supremacy Ta-Nehisi Coates
3d9a13f So many people chased after me in that time, calling my name, asking me to take them with me. Then there was the small percentage who called me casually over and whispered with their tightend voices. people war Markus Zusak
5ef05dc Stealing is what the army does. Taking your father, and mine. war Markus Zusak
e0a7a0c Are these soldiers really our enemy, or only the worst reflection of our own selves?... We made them. We have to unmake them, not just defeat or kill them. war Kate Elliott
11be815 Through all of those different wars, we came to understand each other. The Mason's fellas just wanted to chill in their area and be left alone. The Border Boys basically wanted the same thing. Stinky and Robert just wanted to be able to sell their drugs and make their money. But us, we were on a mission to take over the whole town. Scrooge, former leader of the Rebellion Raiders street gang that once boasted of having some ten thousand members aggression ambitious conflict-resolution conflicts drugs fighting gang-addiction gang-communities gang-intervention gang-life gang-members gang-wars mission money on-a-mission rebellion-raiders street-fights street-life take-over thug-life turf-wars understand understanding-each-other violence-addiction war Drexel Deal
41e03b5 "Some newspapers, at the very start of the war, protested. Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune, May 12, 1846: We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them perhaps to their capital; we can conquer and "annex" their territory; but what then? Have the histories of the ruin of Greek and Roman liberty consequent on such extensions of empire by the sword no lesson for us? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the "annexation" of half her provinces, will give us more Liberty, a purer Morality, a more prosperous Industry, than we now have? . . . Is not Life miserable enough, comes not Death soon enough, without resort to the hideous enginery of War?" united-states-of-america war Howard Zinn
c55f5e1 What the [Clinton/Lewinsky scandal] showed was that a matter of personal behavior could crowd out of the public's attention far more serious matters, indeed matters of life and death. The House of Representatives would impeach the president on matters of sexual behavior, but it would not impeach him for endangering the lives of children by welfare reform, or for violating international law in bombing other countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan), or for allowing hundreds of thousands of children to die as a result of economic sanctions (Iraq). war Howard Zinn
655e2bb We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war. war zinn Howard Zinn
a2e536b "The literature that followed World War II, James Jones's From Here to Eternity, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, captured this GI anger against the army "brass." In The Naked and the Dead, the soldiers talk in battle, and one of them says: "The only thing wrong with this Army is it never lost a war." Toglio was shocked. "You think we ought to lose this one?" Red found himself carried away. "What have I against the goddam Japs? You think I care if they keep this fuggin jungle? What's it to me if Cummings gets another star?" "General Cummings, he's a good man," Martinez said. "There ain't a good officer in the world," Red stated." war winning Howard Zinn
831a724 A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well - most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They're having a good time, an adventure. That was January's dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen's suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives - a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do - so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one - young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it. veterans war Kim Stanley Robinson
a254869 It is always easier to promote war than peace, easier to end the peace than end the war, because peace is fragile and war is durable. peace war Mark Kurlansky
485ea6a Across the river he could see the burnt and crushed buildings of Fredericksburg, the debris piled along the streets, the scattered ruins of people's lives, lives that were changed forever. His men had done that. Not all of it, of course. The whole corps had seemed to go insane, had turned the town into some kind of violent party, a furious storm that blew out of control, and he could not stop it. The commanders had ordered the provost guards at the bridges to let no goods leave the town, nothing could be carried across the bridges, and so what the men could not keep, what they could not steal, they had just destroyed. And now, he thought, the people will return, trying to rescue some fragile piece of home, and they will find this...and they will learn something new about war, more than the quiet nightmare of leaving your home behind. They will learn that something happens to men, men who have felt no satisfaction, who have absorbed and digested defeat after bloody stupid defeat, men who up to now have done mostly what they were told to do. And when those men begin to understand that it is not anything in them, no great weakness or inferiority, but that it is the leaders, the generals and politicians who tell them what to do, that the fault is there, after a while they will stop listening. Then the beast, the collective anger, battered and bloodied, will strike out, will respond to the unending sights of horror, the deaths of friends and brothers, and it will not be fair or reasonable or just, since there is no intelligence in the beast. They will strike out at whatever presents itself, and here it was the harmless and innocent lives of the people of Fredericksburg. civil-war-eastern-theater futile war Jeff Shaara
f4ae7cf "Dickinson left the rostrum to applause, loud shouts of approval. Franklin was surprised, looked toward Adams, who returned the look, shook his head. The chamber was dismissed, and Franklin pushed himself slowly up out of the chair. He began to struggle a bit, pain in both knees, the stiffness holding him tightly, felt a hand under his arm. "Allow me, sir." Adams helped him up, commenting as he did so, "We have a substantial lack of backbone in this room, I'm afraid." Franklin looked past him, saw Dickinson standing close behind, staring angrily at Adams, reacting to his words. "Mr. Dickinson, a fine speech, sir," said Franklin. Adams seemed suddenly embarrassed, did not look behind him, nodded quickly to Franklin, moved away toward the entrance. Franklin saw Dickinson following Adams, began to follow himself. My God, let's not have a duel. He slipped through the crowd of delegates, making polite acknowledgments left and right, still keeping his eye on Dickinson. The man was gone now, following Adams out of the hall. Franklin reached the door, could see them both, heard the taller man call out, saw Adams turn, a look of surprise. Franklin moved closer, heard Adams say, "My apologies for my indiscreet remark, sir. However, I am certain you are aware of my sentiments." Dickinson seemed to explode in Adams' face. "What is the reason, Mr. Adams, that you New England men oppose our measures of reconciliation? Why do you hold so tightly to this determined opposition to petitioning the king?" Franklin heard other men gathering behind him, filling the entranceway, Dickinson's volume drawing them. He could see Adams glancing at them and then saying, "Mr. Dickinson, this is not an appropriate time..." "Mr. Adams, can you not respond? Do you not desire an end to talk of war?" Adams seemed struck by Dickinson's words, looked at him for a long moment. "Mr. Dickinson, if you believe that all that has fallen upon us is merely talk, I have no response. There is no hope of avoiding a war, sir, because the war has already begun. Your king and his army have seen to that. Please, excuse me, sir." Adams began to walk away, and Franklin could see Dickinson look back at the growing crowd behind him, saw a strange desperation in the man's expression, and Dickinson shouted toward Adams, "There is no sin in hope!" independence war Jeff Shaara
f211a43 "I remember friends from wars all but we forgot. All of them distilled into each wound we caught. Those wounds are all painful places where we fought. Battles never left behind, ones we never sought. war Frank Herbert
c361110 Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death's embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution. shield-wall uhtred war Bernard Cornwell
543297e Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful. duty german germany war werner Anthony Doerr
2af5492 Governments always commit their entire populations when the demands grow heavy enough. By their passive acceptance, these populations become accessories to whatever is done in their name. consent government population war Frank Herbert
49818f1 "To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire "war machine," we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly--to us--applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the "War on Poverty." war warrior Barbara Ehrenreich
e1a40e6 "We come into this world through women: a woman who is spent, broken open, in awe. No wonder women have been worshiped ever since men first saw the crowning of a head, here, legs spread, a brushstroke of light. We are fire. We are water. We are earth. We are air. We are all things elemental. The world begins with "Yes," Changing women: we begin again like the moon. We can no longer deny the destiny that is ours by becoming women who wait: waiting to love, waiting to speak, waiting to act. This is not patience, but pathology. We are sensual, sexual beings, intrinsically bound to both heaven and earth, our bodies a hologram. In our withholding of power, we abrogate power, and that creates war. The Australian poet Judith Wright says, "Our dream was the wrong dream, war women Terry Tempest Williams
82ab2f5 Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all. war Cormac McCarthy
b1608d3 There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse. violence war Cormac McCarthy
10fcb2d If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook...what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman?...I used to think it very important to write only good poetry. Over and over I worked it to make it as flawless as I could. What does it matter now, when men are dying for their hopes and their ideals? If I live or die as a poet it won't matter, but anyone who believes in democracy and freedom and love and culture and peace ought to be busy now. He cannot wait for the tomorrow. meaning poetry propaganda purpose war Nancy Milford
2bd79b1 Circumstances will change and things will be fine, just hold on a little more war Ishmael Beah
e8d7740 Po kazdej wojnie ktos musi posprzatac. poetry polish sprzątać war wojna Wisława Szymborska
9e57c3b He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world. history war Nadeem Aslam
57782a4 A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. sky war Thomas Pynchon
7b453af The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people's history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives as they are lived, deaths as they are died, all that is made of flesh, blood, semen, bone, fire, pain, shit, madness, intoxication, visions, everything that has been passing down here forever, is real history. history war Thomas Pynchon
43bf3f0 But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918) memories travelling war Stefan Zweig
eb35066 Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?' 'Why am I surrounded,' his usual understanding self today, 'by statistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant. war Thomas Pynchon
1ab0503 All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess. politics religion science war Margaret Atwood
0864bea Considering our backgrounds, I found it a strange irony that Ian and I should meet in central Borneo. Both of us were set in motion by the war in Southeast Asia. Ian enlisted. I left the country several weeks before an FBI agent arrived at my parents' front door. social-commentary war Eric Hansen
43e4b09 His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political. laziness occupation occupied-france politics war wwii Iain Pears
240f1db The British were unhinged by the colonists' unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen 'conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war! funny humor revolutionary-war war Ron Chernow
eb29924 The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not. history royalty war Philippa Gregory
8f43543 It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield -- that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in Montague, as in the invisible Germans. death isolation war John Fowles
f355f76 That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will. pride war John Fowles
7878026 Where were all heroical parts but in Helteranius? and a man might make a garment for the moon sooner than fit the o'erleaping actions of great Jalcanaius, who now leaveth but his body to bedung that earth that was lately shaken at his terror. I have waded in red blood to the knee; and in this hour, in my old years, the world is become for me a vision only and a mock-show. trauma war E.R. Eddison
1aba6b7 I didn't hurt anymore, didn't feel like hiding anymore, wasn't scared anymore. Because I wasn't anything anymore. Not anything I love or know or care about. Because thou shalt not kill, Kade. Thou shalt not kill. With all my heart I believed this. And I killed. So what am I now? And why should I live? How am I even alive? Because if this is what our lives are - if doing this to others before they do it unto us is all our lives are - we're already dead. vietnam war David James Duncan
ad7ba8c Jason smiled. The sound of wings was louder now, the fluttering of angels come to carry him home. civil-war death-and-dying war Robert Ferrigno
59741dd Remembering the treatment that had been accorded the Knights and soldiers of St. Elmo, the Maltese inhabitants of Senglea took no prisoners. Hence there arose the expression (used in Malta to this day) 'St. Elmo's pay' for any action in which no mercy is given. retribution revenge st-elmo war Ernle Bradford
e7dd694 In Malta, the Wars of Religion reached their climax. If both sides believed that they saw Paradise in the bright sky above them, they had a close and very intimate knowledge of Hell. jihad knights-of-st-john malta war Ernle Bradford
17ba9f9 "He is, however," Amos continued, "keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel's reactor." Holden ran his fingers through his hair. "So not too generous, then." "Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c." rail-gun speed-of-light tungsten war James S.A. Corey
276ee41 I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That'd be enough. war James S.A. Corey
8e60c19 On bad days you wonder, 'Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife? metalife war wonder David Mitchell
14c9763 "We... have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call "war." war Erich Fromm
5cc61d7 It is not easy to be the citizen of a Superpower, nor is it getting easier. I would feel isolated with my shame if I were not sure that I belong, among millions of Americans, to a perennial minority of the nation. The obstinate bleeding hearts who will never agree that might makes right and know if the end justifies the means, the end is worthless. Power corrupts, an old truism but why does it also make the powerful so stupid? Their power schemes become unstuck in time, at cruel cost to other; then the powerful put their stupid important heads together and invent the next similar schemes [written 1987]. power-corrupts stupidity vietnam war Martha Gellhorn
a0121d2 "That's a rather subversive idea, isn't it? "Do you think so? I don't. If it is subversive, then everything else is too, even breathing. I feel and think as naturally and necessarily as I breathe. If men hate each other, then there is not hope. We will all be the victims of that hate. We will slaughter each other in wars we don't want and for which we're not responsible. They'll put a flag in front of us and fill ours ears with words. And why? To plant the seeds for a new war, to create more hatred, to create new flags and new words. Is that why we're here? To have children and hurl them into the fiery furnace? To build cities and then raze them to the ground? To long for peace and have war instead? "And would love solve everything," asked Able with a sad, slightly ironic smile. "I don't know. It's the only thing we haven't tried so far..." "And will we be in time?" "Possibly. If those who suffer can be convinced that it's true, then yes, we might be in time..." He paused, as if assailed by a sudden thought, "But don't forget, Abel, you must love with a love that is lucid and active! And make sure that the active side never forgets abut the lucid side and that the active side never commits the same kind of villainous deeds as those who want men to hate each other. Active, but lucid. And above all, lucid!" love war José Saramago
bb1b183 That afternoon, long after the stool has been put away and the waltzes have stopped, while Werner sits with his transceiver listening to nothing, a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six or seven years old, small for her age, with big clear eyes that remind him of Jutta's. She runs across the street to the park and plays there alone, beneath the budding trees, while her mother stands on the corner and bites the tips of her fingers. The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner's soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip. war Anthony Doerr
8a9e29e A single strand appeared to unite these conflicts, and that was the advancement of a small coterie's concept of American interests in the guise of the fight against terrorism... I recognized that if this was to be the single most important priority of our species, then the lives of those of us who lived in lands in which such killers also lived had no meaning except as collateral damage. terrorism war Mohsin Hamid
211b5fc Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity. love war Graham Greene
9796f5d Then, my son, when the strong have devoured each other, the Christian ethic may at last be fulfilled, and the meek shall inherit the earth. meek strong war James Hilton
e09c63e When guns boom, the arts die. guns war Howard Zinn
d5f3cc1 "The plight of Jews in German-occupied Europe, which many people thought was at the heart of the war against the Axis, was not a chief concern of Roosevelt. Henry Feingold's research (The Politics of Rescue) shows that, while the Jews were being put in camps and the process of annihilation was beginning that would end in the horrifying extermination of 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews, Roosevelt failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives. He did not see it as a high priority; he left it to the State Department, and in the State Department anti-Semitism and a cold bureaucracy became obstacles to action. Was the war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over "inferior" races? The United States' armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed onto the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white. It was, ironically, a black physician named Charles Drew who developed the blood bank system. He was put in charge of the wartime donations, and then fired when he tried to end blood segregation. Despite the urgent need for wartime labor, blacks were still being discriminated against for jobs. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said: "The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities.... Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them." Roosevelt never did anything to enforce the orders of the Fair Employment Practices Commission he had set up." racism war world-war-2 Howard Zinn
84f828c When President Jimmy Carter, responding to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, called for the registration of young men for military draft, more than 800,000 (10 percent) failed to register. One mother wrote to the New York Times: To the Editor:Thirty-six years ago I stood in front of the crematorium. The ugliest force in the world had promised itself that I should be removed from the cycle of life - that I should never know the pleasure of giving life. With great guns and great hatred, this force thought itself the equal of the force of life. I survived the great guns, and with every smile of my son, they grow smaller. It is not for me, sir, to offer my son's blood as lubricant for the next generation of guns. I remove myself and my own from the cycle of death. Isabella Leitner son war Howard Zinn
24b8364 "A Yale professor of military history, Micheal Howard, writing in the New York Times )January 28, 1991) quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: "The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horrifying act must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity." humanity war Howard Zinn
17da70c [W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form. punishment war warfare John Keegan
a415fd9 It was during this terrible night that the three wounded died, and the jeeps froze solid. korean-war war Pat Frank
38e4123 A leader was surely forced to offer something which appealed to those he led? He might give the impetus to the falling building, but surely it had to be toppling on its own account before it fell? If this were true, then wars were not calamities into which amiable innocents were led by evil men. They were national movements, deeper, more subtle in origins. war T. H. White
155299c You're British, you're a priest, you're a medical doctor, you can handle a rifle, you know Morse Code, and most importantly of all, you're a fucking pain in the ass - so off you go! war Neal Stephenson
997ab6e We spent today sending men to hell. What's more natural than to pass the night dreaming of procreating a few more to take their place? life sex war A.J. Hartley and David Hewson
5baff07 Nothing at all to change: what a thing to want in the midst of war. war ww2 Julie Orringer
d600ec0 We realized that among us, among all the races, we had a staggering fund of knowledge and of techniques - that working together, by putting together all this knowledge and capability, we could arrive at something that would be far greater and more significant than any race, alone, could hope of accomplishing. war Clifford D. Simak
40faebb Nous ne sommes pas de ceux qui flattent la guerre; quand l'occasion s'en presente, nous lui disons ses verites. La guerre a d'affreuses beautes que nous n'avons point cachees; elle a aussi, convenons-en, quelques laideurs. Une des plus surprenantes, c'est le prompt depouillement des morts apres la victoire. L'aube qui suit une bataille se leve toujours sur des cadavres nus. war Victor Hugo
796315d About a week after they had come back, a load of mail came to the island. They were the first letters the men had received in several weeks, and for a night it relieved the changeless pattern of their lives. One of the infrequent rations of beer was given out the same night, and the men finished their three cans quickly, and sat about without saying very much. The beer had been far too inadequate to make them drunk; it made them only moody and reflective, it opened the gate to all their memories, and left them sad, hungering for things they could not name. war Norman Mailer
62b652f He told her about the first time he had looked on the back of her neck as she sat in the church pew. Of the feeling that had never let go of him since. He talked to her of the great waste of years between then and now. A long time gone. And it was pointless, he said, to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell, Inman said, for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. Nevertheless, over all those wasted years, he had held in his mind the wish to kiss her there at the back of her neck, and now he had done it. There was a redemption of some kind, he believed, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred. hope war Charles Frazier
9a98b09 Un pais gana mas con un ano de paz que con diez de guerra. queen war wisdom Jean Plaidy
1b3fcf1 "She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore." death-and-dying war Jonathan Safran Foer
b5a72a1 Avventurose eta e benedette quelle che non seppero la spaventevole furia di queste indemoniate macchine dell'artiglieria, l'inventore delle quali io ritengo che sia nell'inferno a ricevere il guiderdone del suo diabolico ritrovato, per mezzo del quale fece si che un ignobile e codardo braccio possa toglier la vita a un prode cavaliere. chivalry knight sword war Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
cc4dccf " ," Beranabus murmurs, face crinkling. "Most humans know nothing of true warfare. They wage their silly territorial battles, kill each other ruthlessly and freely, and consider themselves experts on war and suffering. But the real war has always been ahead of them, unseen, unimagined. Enemies who can't be killed by normal weapons, who have their base in an alternate universe, who are interested only in slaughtering every living being on the face of the planet." death demons planet war Darren Shan
6e45504 Leitenantu Sheiskopfu otchaianno khotelos' zavoevat' pervoe mesto na parade, i, obdumyvaia, kak eto sdelat', on prosizhival za stolom chut' ne do rassveta, v to vremia kak ego zhena, okhvachennaia liubovnym trepetom, dozhidalas' ego v posteli, perelistyvaia zavetnye stranitsy Krafta-Ebbinga. Muzh v eto vremia chital knigi po stroevoi podgotovke. On zakupal korobkami shokoladnykh soldatikov i perestavlial ikh na stole, poka oni ne nachinali taiat' v rukakh, i togda on prinimalsia za plastmassovykh kovboev, vystraivaia ikh po dvenadtsati v riad. Etikh kovboev on vypisal po pochte na vymyshlennuiu familiiu i dnem derzhal pod zamkom, podal'she ot chuzhikh glaz. Al'bom s anatomicheskimi risunkami Leonardo da Vinchi stal ego nastol'noi knigoi. Odnazhdy vecherom on pochuvstvoval, chto emu neobkhodima zhivaia model', i prikazal zhene promarshirovat' po komnate. -- Goloi?! -- s nadezhdoi v golose sprosila ona. Leitenant Sheiskopf v otchaianii skhvatilsia za golovu. On proklinal sud'bu za to, chto ona sviazala ego s etoi zhenshchinoi, ne sposobnoi podniat'sia vyshe pokhoti i poniat' dushu blagorodnogo muzhchiny, kotoryi geroiski vedet poistine titanicheskuiu bor'bu vo imia nedosiagaemogo ideala. -- Pochemu ty menia nikogda ne postegaesh' knutom, milyi? -- obizhenno naduv gubki, odnazhdy noch'iu sprosila zhena. -- Potomu chto u menia net na eto vremeni, -- neterpelivo ogryznulsia on. -- Net vremeni, iasno? Neuzheli ty ne znaesh', chto u menia parad na nosu? sex war Joseph Heller
9e8f444 In a time of war the supply and movement of money becomes even more crucial than ever. Money is a powerful tool, and wars are about powerful men and how they use the tools at their disposal. The military is involved in a number of ways. power war Jacqueline Winspear
4c6868b . That was it. ... A simple line, an aphorism, that seemed to suggest the selling of manure. But it had a meaning that went so much deeper, alluding to the fact that where you find filth - where you find dirt; where you find the detritus of life - you'll also discover someone making a profit. Much money can be made from the most dirty jobs. . That was another one. And it occurred to her that in her lifetime she had seen nothing more filthy than war itself. maisie-dobbs profiteering war Jacqueline Winspear
2bef06c But there are many men-and women-who do things in a time of war that they wouldn't dream of doing in peacetime, and all for the common good. war Jacqueline Winspear
98e0ef9 It was this war and not World War II which established a far-flung American base structure abroad and a national security state at home, as defence spending nearly quadrupled in the last six months of 1950, and turned the United States in the policeman of the world. military-history the-korean-war war war-history Bruce Cumings
4f4de13 Eventually the Korean War will be understood as one of the most destructive and one of the most important wars of the twentieth century. korea korean-war military-history war Bruce Cumings
c180e64 In fact the United States has had no exit strategy since 1945, expect in places where we were kicked out (Vietnam) or asked to leave (the Philippines): American troops still occupy Japan, Korea, and Germany, in the seventh decade after the end of World War II. Policymakers - almost always civilians with little or no military experience (Acheson is the archetype) - get Americans into wars but cannot get them out, and soon the Pentagon takes over, establishes bases, and the entire enterprise becomes a perpetual-motion machine fuelled by a defence budget that dwarfs all others in the world. korean-war military military-history war Bruce Cumings
7bcb2e9 Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February? protest war weather Rebecca Goldstein
bffb11f Before man's bravery I bow my head: More so when valour is unnatural And fear, a bat between the shoulder-blades Flaps its cold webs - but I am ill at ease With propaganda glory, and the lies Of statesmen and the lords of slippery trades. - May 1941. propaganda war Mervyn Peake
5fae640 Perhaps war was due to fear: to fear of reliability. Unless there was truth, and unless people told the truth, there was always danger in everything outside the individual. You told the truth to yourself, but you had no surety for your neighbour. This uncertainty must end by making the neighbour a menace. politics war T. H. White
1f287da It gives the war a whole new dimension, you know, hearing from someone right there in the thick of it. They really connected with it.' 'Maybe it reminds them of school,' she suggests. 'Didn't someone describe the trenches as ninety-nine per cent boredom and one per cent terror?' 'I don't know about boredom. God, the chaos of it, the brutality. And it's so vivid. I'd definitely be interested in reading his poetry, if only to see how he can go from describing, you know, people getting their guts blown out, to writing about love.' 'Maybe it's not that much of a leap,' she says. love poetry war Paul Murray
f74874d Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. peace power religion war Kim Stanley Robinson
574d693 "It's funny, isn't it," Miss Woolf whispered in Ursula's ear, "how much German music we listen to. Great beauty transcends all. Perhaps after the war it will heal all too." -- healing music peace war Kate Atkinson
5d820a8 The trenches', wrote Robert Kee fifty years later, 'were the concentration camps of the First World War'; and though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something Treblinka-like about almost all accounts of July 1st, about those long docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the Somme produce in readers and audiences much the same emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz - guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity and anger - and not only from the pacific and tender-hearted; not only from the military historian, on whom, as he recounts the extinction of this brave effort or that, falls an awful lethargy, his typewriter keys tapping leadenly on the paper to drive the lines of print, like the waves of a Kitchener battalioon failing to take its objective, more and more slowly towards the foot of the page; but also from professional soldiers [...] Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? why did they not stop one battalion following in the wake of another to join it in death? war wwi John Keegan
f34d058 Yes, they'd lost. But it was just a battle, not the war. star-wars war Timothy Zahn
21b0c1f Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn't win medals but wars. war Iain M. Banks
0d24b51 "We are all ghosts," Morris Klapper said at last. "We are conceived in a moment of death and born out of ghost wombs, and we play in the streets with other little ghosts, chanting ghost-rhymes and scratching to become real. We are told that life is full of goals and that, although it is sadly necessary to fight, you can at least choose your war. But we learn that for ghosts there can only be one battle: to become real. A few of us make it, thus encouraging other ghosts to believe it can be done." ghosts goals morris-klapper necessary-to-fight real to-become-real war Peter S. Beagle
4c886c1 We soldiers knew next to nothing about what was going on in the centres of power. We received so many orders and counter-orders that there were times when we did not obey any of them at all, knowing that they were likely to be countermanded almost immediately. soldiers war ww2 ww2-books Louis de Bernières
e78409b In quei giorni i funerali erano piu semplici e sbrigativi, a causa dei combattimenti. Alcune famiglie non avevano altra scelta che seppellire i propri morti in un cortile o in un punto riparato lungo una strada, essendo impossibile raggiungere un vero cimitero, e di conseguenza sorsero luoghi di sepoltura improvvisati, dove un cadavere ne attirava subito altri, un po' come l'arrivo di un occupante abusivo in un terreno pubblico inutilizzato puo dare origine a un'intera baraccopoli. occupazione-luoghi-pubblici war Mohsin Hamid
c09cfbe Tre ragazzi passano ridendo e Max li guarda con intensita. Su un muro butterato e chiazzato di licheni e fissata una piccola lapide di pietra. <>Ici a ete tue Buy Gaston Marcel age de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 aout 1944. Jutta si siede per terra. Il mare e gonfio, grigio d'ardesia. Non ci sono lapidi per i tedeschi morti qui. war Anthony Doerr
d7a12ec What the war did to the dreamers. war Anthony Doerr
6442b45 - Then tell me of your long journey home, Ada said. Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over, how he watched Orion climb higher up the slope of sky night by night, and how he had tried to walk with no hope and no fear but had failed miserably, for he had done both. But how on the best days of walking he achieved some success in matching his thoughts to the weather, dark or bright, so as to attune with what freak of God's mind sent cloud or shine. Then he added, I met a number of folks on the way. There was a goatwoman that fed me, and she claimed it's a sign of God's mercy that He won't let us remember the reddest details of pain. He knows the parts we can't bear and won't let our minds render them again. In time, from disuse, they pale away. At least such was her thinking. God lays the unbearable on you and then takes some back. trauma war Charles Frazier
bcd8c37 he inadvertently opened the door to a storeroom on the station and found it full of aircrew uniforms on hangers. He thought they must be replacement issue until he looked more closely and saw the brevets and stripes and ribbon medals and realized they had come off the bodies of the dead and injured. The empty uniforms would have provided a poetic image if he hadn't more or less relinquished poetry by then. war Kate Atkinson
215a42a If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken. path-not-taken road-not-taken war Louis de Bernières
ed66f49 ?Sabes cual es la leccion mas importante d ela historia? Que solo la escriben los vencedores. Esa es la leccion. El que decide el rumbo de la historia es el que gana. historia history war Anthony Doerr
789ea23 I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. evil slavery superstition war W.E.B. Du Bois
134defa Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled. resistance war Anthony Doerr
9f9076c What was a prisoner of war anyway? Less than a man, just material to be used to make the railway, like the teak sleepers and steel rails and dog spikes. war Richard Flanagan
4d8b748 They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet. war Anthony Doerr
bd09341 You make peace with one sister only to declare war on the other. It's always like that with peace, isn't it? Always to someone's detriment, already sowing the seed for the next war. fairy-tales fantasy peace portal-fantasy war war-and-peace young-adult young-adult-fantasy Cornelia Funke
01cd5f8 It's the time to run away an' hide under the bed, an' hope the world's still in one piece when you come out again. hide war world Garth Ennis
9e75607 Love and war are exactly alike. It is lawful to use tricks and slights to obtain a desired end. war Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
92431b7 "Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites. past war Richard Flanagan
aea5ab4 Well, I once recall an old master sergeant once telling me that NCOs look after the men so that officers can figure out how to get them killed. That's the difference between maintenance and command. killed maintenance military ncos officers war Garth Ennis
71a907a After all, you can't really blame the Waffen S.S. for doing what comes naturally. But a funny thing happened on the way to the moral high ground. nazis ss waffen-ss war Garth Ennis
1287411 Dr. Soekarno was always exactly what he was in the beginning, a whizz-bang demagogue, an opportunist, just another little dictator. U.S. officialdom never tires of backing that type. Nor does U.S. officialdom take sufficient note of the writing on the wall, such as: Down With All Whites. I wonder what the phrase looks like in Vietnamese. indonesia java martha-gellhorn war Martha Gellhorn
9e12bbe War is now a form of TV entertainment war Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
c3d48ae "It is amazing that the refugees stay sane. First the bombs, perhaps the "battle" around them, their casualties, their naked helplessness; then the flight, leaving behind everything they have worked for all their lives; then the semi-starvation and ugly hardship of the camps or the slums; and as a final cruelty, the killing diseases which only strike at them." poverty refugees vietnam war Martha Gellhorn
b8c52f3 He could help put a man on the Moon, but he couldn't count the body bags. Send a satellite spinning, but he couldn't figure out how many crosses to go into the ground. space vietnam-war war Colum McCann
1e49912 "Perche finche la guerra e altrove, non riesci a prenderla sul serio. Come ha detto Martha Gellhorn "La guerra e un fatto personale". E proprio cosi: finche non capita a te, non riesci a capirla, tanto meno a immaginarla. Finche non entra nella tua vita e irreale" reality war Lucy Foley
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