Quotes on War

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front; _x000D_ _x000D_ And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds _x000D_ _x000D_ To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, _x000D_ _x000D_ He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber _x000D_ _x000D_ To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Religious War has signified the greatest advance of the masses so far, for it proves that the masses have begun to treat concepts with respect.

The ultimate in disposing one's troops is to be without ascertainable shape. Then the most penetrating spies cannot pry in nor can the wise lay plans against you.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.

I think our support for the EEC has been very half-hearted. You really cannot join any group of nations and spend all your time criticising it. The EEC is free Europe getting together. Had we had some vision like that after the first world war , we might never had the second ... my son does not have to go and fight as his father had to fight. Surely that is the most valuable thing of all, the reason for keeping Europe together.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

The military mind always imagines that the next war will be on the same lines as the last. That has never been the case and never will be. One of the great factors on the next war will be aircraft obviously. The potentialities of aircraft attack on a large scale are almost incalculable.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.

There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender.

I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.

I have to admit that the empty prestige and the stupid glory - yes, the horrible rush, the deadly sense of importance that war brings to life - are hard illusions to shake off. Look at me, a war correspondent.

Capitalism’s real “grave-diggers” may end up being its own delusional Cardinals, who have turned ideology into faith. Despite their strategic brilliance, they seem to have trouble grasping a simple fact: Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises-War and Shopping-simply will not work.

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.