War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
Interpretation
Some individuals find a sense of excitement and purpose in war despite its destructive nature.
In this quote, Kathryn Bigelow highlights the paradox of war: while it brings devastation and suffering, there are individuals who are drawn to it, perhaps due to the adrenaline, camaraderie, or a sense of duty it offers. This complex relationship between humanity and conflict suggests that not everyone views war solely as a tragedy, illuminating the darker aspects of human nature and the allure of violence.
In practice
In a discussion about the realities of war, one might use this quote to emphasize the unforeseen allure some individuals find in battle.
Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
I'd love to just think of myself as a filmmaker, and I wait for the day when the modifier can be a moot point.
I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not.
If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.
There should be more women directing; I think there's just not the awareness that it's really possible.
You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.
These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.
War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.
In the account book of the Great War the page recording the Russian losses has been ripped out. The figures are unknown. Five millions, or eight? We ourselves know not. All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.
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