Quotes on Wars

When I was growing up reading history books as a young student, it seemed all wars had a winner. Yet in today's wars, it is increasingly clear that no one wins. Everyone loses.

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today's wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium - and tens of millions of Americans will feel a similar revulsion for the politicians and generals who were so spendthrift with others' lives.

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of guerilla-type wars, that the Obama Administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon Administration ever did.

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.

The wars we fought were forced upon us. Thanks to the Israel Defense Forces, we won them all, but we did not win the greatest victory that we aspired to: release from the need to win victories.

Wars are usually really popular with people that aren't gonna be affected by them. 'Cause it's just entertainment, and it's just weird, like, 'Well, we've got to show the world that we're strong.' No we don't. And by the way, that has nothing to do with you. Why are you equating yourself with that... you know what I mean?

The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.

The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.

It is not our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, the language we speak, nor the religion we practice that creates friction, hatred and wars amongst in society. It is our words and the words of our leaders that can create that disparity.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

The greatest of all crimes are the wars that are carried on by governments, to plunder, enslave, and destroy mankind.

Ultimately, my books are not about the politics, although the toil and the struggle and the wars in Afghanistan have a significant impact on the lives of my characters.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.