Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
1 2 3 4 5 6 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
5d2fdf3 A common thread that weaves the stories of all the captives together is race--one racial group attacking another. Many innocent people were simply trying to live their ordinary lives when another group decided it was justifiable to use violence to rob, beat, murder, kidnap, sometimes mutilate, and enslave others and their loved ones. history innocents race racism southwest war Noel Marie Fletcher
a8e3440 Carleton took issue with Steck's advocacy on behalf of Natives and embarked on a campaign with military leaders on Capitol Hill that eventually forced Steck out of his job. carleton history military native-american steck war Noel Marie Fletcher
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
5b629a3 "There will never again be men like them," said Carreen softly. "No one can take their places." loss men war Margaret Mitchell
189c935 The implications of the true story are existential and corrosive to our larger national myth. To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it? freedom mythology race race-relations racism slavery war Ta-Nehisi Coates
8643bb2 Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing. war James S.A. Corey
22149b0 Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128 war Donna Tartt
561fa40 The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs. dying life war Richard Flanagan
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
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
f7ab16f My mother told stories - of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air-raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . . air-raid rats war Jeanette Winterson
90db710 Kogda umiraet chelovek, polozheno vinit' kogo-to ili chto-to. Dzhimmi Kross eto ponimal. Mozhno vinit' voinu. Mozhno vinit' idiotov, kotorye voinu razviazali. Mozhno vinit' Kaiovu za to, chto na nee poshel. Mozhno vinit' dozhd'. Mozhno vinit' reku. Mozhno vinit' pole, griaz', klimat. Mozhno vinit' vraga. Mozhno vinit' artilleriiskie snariady. Mozhno vinit' liudei, kotorye polenilis' prochest' gazetu, kotorym naskuchili ezhednevnye soobshcheniia o chisle pogibshikh, kotorye perekliuchaiut kanaly pri odnom tol'ko upominanii politiki. Mozhno vinit' tselye narody. Mozhno vinit' Boga. Mozhno vinit' proizvoditelei oruzhiia ili Karla Marksa, zluiu sud'bu ili starika v Omakhe, zabyvshego progolosovat'. No posredi polia prichiny vsegda neposredstvennye. Minutnaia nebrezhnost', ili oshibochnoe suzhdenie, ili obychnaia glupost' imeiut posledstviia, kotorye dliatsia vechno. war Tim O'Brien
5044422 They would repair the leaks in their eyes. manliness war Tim O'Brien
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
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
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
2c1723a She doesn't realize yet though men go to war it is the women who suffer--perhaps more than anyone. war women Philippa Gregory
55485d8 "-"I remember my father telling me about England's redrawing of India's boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused." -"You keep proving my point, Tom, that we're rotten to the core." -"My point is we never learn!" war David Baldacci
6699fb2 "It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted ... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology ... by a conspiracy between human beings and techniques, by something that needed the energy-burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely, dawn is nearly here, I need my night's blood, my funding, funding, ahh more, more ... The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms - it was only staged to look that way - but among the different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite ..." technology war Thomas Pynchon
fcf4989 The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. futility-of-war war Thomas Pynchon
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
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
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
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
1f50e68 I am going to be Queen of England,' I protest. 'You make it sound like a battle to the death.' 'It is a battle to the death,' she says simply. 'That is what it means to be Queen of England. You are not Melusina, rising from a fountain to easy happiness. You will not be a beautiful woman at court with nothing to do but make magic. The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win. historical romance war Philippa Gregory
d873e98 Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you. war Mark Helprin
ae682ac "Absage Lieber von einem Faschisten erschlagen werden Als selber Faschist sein! Lieber von einem Kommunisten erschlagen werden Als selber Kommunist sein! Wir haben den Krieg nicht vergessen. Wir wissen, Wie das berauscht, wenn man Trommel und Pauke ruhrt. Wir sind taub, wir werden nicht mitgerissen, Wenn ihr das Volk mit dem alten Rauschgift verfuhrt. Wir sind weder Soldaten noch Weltverbesserer mehr, Wir glauben nicht, dass "an unserem Wesen Die Welt musse genesen". Wir sind arm, wir haben Schiffbruch gelitten, Wir glauben alle an die hubschen Phrasen nicht mehr, Mit denen man uns in den Krieg gepeitscht und geritten - Auch die Euren, rote Bruder, sind Zauber und fuhren zu Krieg und Gas! Auch Eure Fuhrer sind Generale, Kommandieren, schreien und organisieren, Wir aber, wir hassen das, Wir trinken den Fusel nicht mehr, Wir wollen Herz und Vernunft nicht verlieren, Nicht unter roten noch weissen Fahnen marschieren. Lieber wollen wir einsam als "Traumer" verderben Oder unter Euren blutigen Bruderhanden sterben, Als irgend ein Partei- und Machtgluck geniessen war Hermann Hesse
06d37ca There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier soldier war Philippa Gregory
8a6a617 Civilians seldom understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion. The former soldier assumes that when time weakens the dream of civilian life and its supports pull away, he will revert to the one state that will always hold his heart. He dreams of war and remembers it in quiet times when he might otherwise devote himself to different things, and he is ruined for the peace. What he has seen is as powerful and mysterious as death itself, and yet he has not died, and he wonders why. war Mark Helprin
728171f It was the fact that I didn't want to kill anyone. I wasn't put on this earth to murder my fellow man. I'd grown up with violence - can't you see that? I can't bear it. war John Boyne
e4c8a63 If I die anytime soon, you make sure they bury me right. history war Markus Zusak
b18647d For DeHaven it was well worth the extra money to a federal budget that had always allocated more to war than it ever did to peaceful purposes. For a fraction of the cost of one missile he could purchase on the open market every work the library needed to round out its rare books collection. Yet politicians believed that missiles kept you safe, whereas actually books did, and for a simple reason. Ignorance caused wars, and people who read widely were seldom ignorant. ignorance library war David Baldacci
39c2e49 1. The desperate Jews - their spirits in my lap as we sat on the roof, next to the steaming chimneys. 2. The Russian soldiers - taking only small amounts of ammunition, relying on the fallen for the rest of it. 3. The soaked bodies of a French coast - beached on the shingle and sand. souls war Markus Zusak
e2130e2 the greatest trick of kings is to fool the poor into thinking we have common cause with the rich simply because we live on the same bog. Then the poor get their heads split open in the battles they fight so the rich can keep their wine cellars well stocked. politics poor rich war Kate Horsley
3796708 My stol'ko voevali, i vse radi togo, chtoby nam ne perekrasili doma v goluboi tsvet (<>, G.G. Markes) war война свобода-выбора Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
173cb0f The result of these shared experiences was a closeness unknown to all outsiders. Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers. Their trust in, and knowledge of, each other is total. They got to know each other's life stories, what they did before they came into the Army, where and why they volunteered, what they liked to eat and drink, what their capabilities were. On a night march they would hear a cough and know who it was; on a night maneuver they would see someone sneaking through the woods and know who it was from his silhouette. comrades soldiers stephen-e-ambrose war Stephen E. Ambrose
ec57fbd More or less everyone has lost someone, whatever side they belong to. war Carlos Ruiz Zafón
ee160d2 "We could unleash all this technology at once. You can imagine what would happen then. But that's not the interesting thing." "What is the interesting thing?" "The interesting thing is that we have a moral sense. It is on punched cards, perhaps the most advanced and sensitive moral sense the world has ever known." "Because it is on punched cards?" "It considers all considerations in endless and subtle detail," he said. "It even quibbles. With this great new moral tool, how can we go wrong? I confidently predict that, although we could employ all this splendid new weaponry I've been telling you about, we're not going to do it." war Donald Barthelme
859c4b7 Tenemos putrefactores, plagas y oxidos capaces de atacar su alfabeto. Estos son la leche. Tenemos un producto quimico para encoger sus cabanas que penetra las fibras del bambu provocando que las chozas asfixien a sus ocupantes. Esto funciona solo despues de las diez de la noche, cuando la gente duerme. Sus matematicas estan a merced de un supurante numero sordo que hemos inventado. Tenemos una familia de peces entrenados para atacar a sus peces.Tenemos el mortal telegrama destructor de testiculos. Las companias de telecomunicaciones estan colaborando con el proyecto. Tenemos una sustancia verde que, bueno, mejor no hablo de esto. humor war Donald Barthelme
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
6d0d702 Psychology is a soft weapon but you can take out more enemy battalions with leaflets and radio broadcasts than with high explosives. war Nelson DeMille
dd1505c "I remember my father telling me about England's redrawing of India's boundaries when it became independent. They wanted to separate the Hindu from the Muslim, but they used outdated maps. Twelve million people had to relocate because the Brits screwed it up so badly. And a half million people died during the resulting chaos. And before that, Iraq was unilaterally cobbled together, causing many of the conflicts we see today. There are dozens of such examples. The strong countries smashing the weaker ones and then avoiding responsibility later for the very problems they caused." "You keep proving my point, Tom, that we're rotten to the core." "My point is we never learn!" religion war David Baldacci
1a0d5db "Birds of the Western Front Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover above the shelling. They don't turn a feather when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth, flickering star-shells and flares from the Revelation of St John. You look away from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap against one corner of a thicket to the partridge of the war zone making its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling to the hard dry stars of observation. How you survive. They were all at it: Orchids of the Crimea nature notes from the trench leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass. You replace gangrene and gas mask with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-gun tracery gutted that stricken wood you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro through splintered branches, breaking buds and never a green bough left. Hundreds lay in there wounded. If any, you say, spotted one bird they may have wondered why a thing with wings would stay in such a place. She must have, sure, had chicks she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert. Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn sounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-land latticed like folds of brain with shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrong you hold to what you know. A little nature study. A solitary magpie blue and white spearing a strand of willow. One for sorrow. One for Babylon, Ninevah and Northern France, for mice and desolation, the burgeoning war western-front Ruth Padel
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
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
d7a12ec What the war did to the dreamers. war Anthony Doerr
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
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
4d8b748 They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet. war Anthony Doerr
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
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
c8f60b8 Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out. That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress. war war-profiteering Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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
9981143 ...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets. war Azar Nafisi
9e12bbe War is now a form of TV entertainment war Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
790b6d8 "Jack Reed, whom The New York Times had labeled "the Bolshevik agitator," hesitated and then equivocated on the stand. But by then the defense of The Masses was plain: criticism of the government didn't amount to a desire to overthrow it. If all hostile opinion were suppressed, how could Americans believe they lived in a free country? Dissent was a safeguard to freedom, not an impediment." -- independence liberty philosophy politics war Nancy Milford
cebf249 The recruits of 1914 have the look of ghosts. They are queuing up to be slaughtered: they are already dead. ghosts soldiers somme war Geoff Dyer
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
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
a241587 As for national greatness: It is probably true that all nations are great and even holy at the time of death. The Biafrans had never fought before. They fought well this time. They will never fight again. They will never play Finlandia on an ancient marimba again. Peace. patriotism war Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
301d845 "Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear." -When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" dacca indo pakistani war Jhumpa Lahiri
c119167 There seldom seemed to be a house left with a roof, or with anything much beyond its four walls, and quite often they must lie staring up at the stars, which would stare back again, aloof and untroubled. war Radclyffe Hall
5795ce8 The ageing and the cynical may make wars, but the young and the idealistic must fight them, and thus there are bound to come quick reactions, blind impulses not always comprehended. Men will curse as they kill, yet accomplish deeds of self-sacrifice, giving their lives for others; poets will write with their pens dipped in blood, yet will write not of death but of life eternal; strong and courteous friendships will be born, to endure in the face of enmity and destruction. And so persistent is this urge to the ideal, above all in the presence of great disaster, that mankind, the willful destroyer of beauty, must immediately strive to create new beauties, lest it perish from a sense of its own desolation; and this urge touched the Celtic soul of Mary. the-well-of-loneliness war Radclyffe Hall
d420301 The heart of evil beats in Afghanistan. When men hold every advantage, neither wealth, nor beauty, nor intelligence, nor education, nor strength, nor family can compete with gender. Women have only prayer and hope as allies. boys evil feminism hope prayer rights war women Jean Sasson
f34d058 Yes, they'd lost. But it was just a battle, not the war. star-wars war Timothy Zahn
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
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
1 2 3 4 5 6 ▲ ▼