War Is Hell/Quotes

"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war." —Otto Von Bismarck

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it." —General Robert E. Lee

"Make no mistake. War is coming. With all its glory. And with all its horror." —Arcturus Mengsk

"In war...there are no winners." —Ramman Kenoun

"Kill the enemy....Dress it up however you want, that's what war is about. If there's glory in there somewhere, I must have missed it." —Jake, Animorphs

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." —Albert Einstein

"War! What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!" —Edwin Starr

"Nothing but a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won." —Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington

"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers." —Jose Narosky

"War does not determine who is right — only who is left." —Bertrand Russell

"This is a war without victory." —The President of the USA, Future War 198X

"Join the Imperial Guard or die. Then die." —The Internet on Warhammer 40000's Imperial Guard faction.

"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell." —General William Tecumseh Sherman

"Wars not make one great." —Yoda, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

"War is sweet to them that know it not." —Pindar

"Hey! ...War is dumb." —Sgt. Slaughter, Motivational Speaker

"Give me a projection on Marine casualties." "1000 to 2500, sir." "Total?" "No, sir. Per week." —Prototype

"In a recent battle Player X completely destroyed Player Y's ship. The moment Player Y tried to flee he was vaporized by Player X's shots. War Is Hell." —GNN, Pardus

"Up at the front you're alive or you're dead, and that's all! You can't fool anybody about that very long. Up there we know we're lost and done for whether we're dead or alive. Three years we've had of it... four years. Every day a year and every night a century. Our bodies are earth and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death." —Paul Bäumer, All Quiet on the Western Front (film)

"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war." —All Quiet on the Western Front (epigraph)

"There was a little girl. Maybe, eight years old? I dunno. She'd lost both her legs. Just kept staring at them. Little stumps, cauterized by fire somehow. A little girl, all alone, looking at where her legs were, not understanding anything. Just . . . staring. Blank little eyes. Staring." —Tiberium Wars

"They built Shepard Stadium about 2011 for sports shows. They upgraded it in 2019 as a makeshift shelter in case of ion storms. Capacity was about forty thousand people. Three weeks into TW 3, it was filled with three hundred thousand. They didn't mind. None of them. They were all in black bags." —Anonymous GDI medical worker, Tiberium Wars

"We forge futures out of pain and grief, Commander. The computers and the communications officers and the EV As and the displays only serve to isolate us so we can be inhuman. We're monsters, son. Cold, mechanical, rational monsters, and the only way we win is by being colder, more mechanical, and more rational than the next monster moving his little pieces on the screen. That's how war has been fought since Stalin rolled into the Allies a century ago. You point, you click, and they die. It's how it works." —Colonel Nick Parker, Tiberium Wars "Chapter XVIII"

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,– My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori." —Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est

"Captain's report February 4th, 2531. Five years, five long years. That's how long it took us to get Harvest back..At first it was going well. Then setback after setback..Loss after loss...Made what was going to be a quick and decisive win..Into five years of Hell...Of course that's all Harvest is today..It's hell down there..But it's ours again." —Captain James Cutter, Halo Wars

"I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers ... tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation." —General William Tecumseh Sherman

"Since the war started, they were the first to lose their lives. But you were there too, commanding in the midst of fighting. Peasants that were cheerfully delivering milk until yesterday, return all banged up today. Every day. Until the war ends, it will continue day in and day out. Can you really handle that?" —Hyakujitsu no Bara

"In the battlefield, there is no place for hope. What lies there is only cold despair and a sin called victory, built on the pain of the defeated. All those people who met there have wholeheartedly admitted the evil and foolishness of this act called 'war'. As long as people don't repent and don't regard it as the most evil taboo, then hell would endlessly reappear in the world." —Emiya Kiritsugu, Fate/Zero

So how do y'do, Private William McBride D'you mind if I sit me down by your graveside and rest for a while in the warm summer sun? I've been walking all day now, and I'm nearly done. And I see by your gravestone you were only nineteen When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916. Well I hope you died quick, and I hope you died clean. Oh Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene? —Eric Bogle, "No Man's Land" (often known as "Green Fields of France" or "Willie McBride")

"Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Tao do not like to employ them. The superior man ordinarily considers the left hand the most honourable place, but in time of war the right hand. Those sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, and not the instruments of the superior man;--he uses them only on the compulsion of necessity. Calm and repose are what he prizes; victory (by force of arms) is to him undesirable. To consider this desirable would be to delight in the slaughter of men; and he who delights in the slaughter of men cannot get his will in the kingdom. On occasions of festivity to be on the left hand is the prized position; on occasions of mourning, the right hand. The second in command of the army has his place on the left; the general commanding in chief has his on the right;--his place, that is, is assigned to him as in the rites of mourning. He who has killed multitudes of men should weep for them with the bitterest grief; and the victor in battle has his place (rightly) according to those rites." —Laozi

"Hear the sound of the machine gun Hear it echo in the night Mortars firing, rains the scene Scars the fields that once were green It's a stalemate at the frontline Where the soldiers rest in mud Frozen houses, all is gone There's no glory to be won [[Men Are the Expendable Gender Know that many men will suffer know that many men will die]] Half a million lives at stake past the fields of Paschendale And as the night falls, the general calls And the battle carries on And on What is the purpose of it all? What's the price of a mile? Thousands of feet march to the beat, it's an army on the march Long way from home, paying the price in young men's lives Thousands of feet march to the beat, it's an army in despair Knee-deep in mud, stuck in the trench with no way out" —Sabaton, The Price Of A Mile

"War... War never changes.. Since the dawn of human kind, when our ancestors first discovered the killing path with rock and bone, blood has been spilled in the name of everything, from God, to justice, to simple psychotic rage. In the year 2077, after millenia of armed conflict, the destructive nature of man could sustain itself no longer. The world was plunged into an abyss of nuclear fire and radiation. But it was not, as some had predicted, the end of the world. Instead, the apocalypse was just the prologue to another bloody chapter of human history. For man, had succeeded destroying the world. But war.. War never changes.." —Fallout 3

al-Jilani: Sources claim you were at the heart of the Presidium during the Battle of the Citadel. It's fair to say the course of the battle hinged on your words. If true, you told Admiral Hackett to assist the Destiny Ascension, costing hundreds of human lives and securing the continued dominance of the Citadel Council. Shephard: The Turians lost 20 cruisers. Figure each had a crew of around 300. The Ascension — the Asari dreadnought we saved — had a crew of nearly 10,000. al-Jilani: But surely the human cost- Shephard: The Alliance lost eight cruisers. Shenyang. Emden. Jakarta. Cairo. Seoul. Cape Town. Warsaw. Madrid. And yes, I remember them all. Everyone in the 5th fleet is a hero. The Alliance owes them all medals, the Council owes them a lot more than that. And so do you. —Mass Effect 2

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen." —Mark Twain, The War Prayer

"War is stupid." —Doug

Ace Ventura: War is hell. The last thing we want is a fight. Ouda: I want a fight, so go to hell! —Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

It was war, you dumb kid. Everybody I liked got killed, and most of the folks I'd just as soon have shot made it out with medals on their chests. It wasn't fair and it sure as hell wasn't any fun. —Cherie Priest, Boneshaker

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. —Bumper sticker

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster. —William T. Sherman

Only the dead have seen the end of war. —George Santayana, Soliloquy #25, "Tipperary"

Betty has gone too far. Killing is wrong. And bad. There should be a new, stronger word for killing, like "badwrong", or "badong". Yes, killing is badong. From this point forward, I shall stand for the opposite of killing...gnodab. —The Chosen One, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist

War is not heroic. War is not exhilarating. It is dark. It is dreadful. It is a thing of sorrow and gloom. That is why people fear war. That is why people choose to avoid it. —Izuru Kira, Bleach

War is never really won by anyone who participates in it. War simply rearranges the way things were and steals the promise of tomorrow from each side. To succeed at war you have to lose a part of your humanity. After you win enough wars, you have no humanity left because you lost a piece of it each time you killed someone. —Major Leon James, MechWarrior 2

Glory is just memory putting a brave face on horror. —Anonymous, from a Napoleonic War vet

"Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. Then they get a taste of battle. For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they’ve been gutted by an axe. They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world... And the man breaks. He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them... but he should pity them as well.” —Septon Meribald, A Feast for Crows

Listen, you folks at home... Today we won a piece of Sov-Cities' dirt. So what? Three good men died for it — that's what matters. Sometimes war is necessary — but don't ever let creeps like this one tell you it's fun. War is pointless. War is evil. WAR IS HELL! —Judge Dredd

"Five years ago, I lost 30,000 men in the blink of an eye, and the world just fucking watched. Tomorrow there will be no shortage of volunteers, no shortage of patriots. I know you understand." —General Shepherd, Modern Warfare 2

Dear Animorphs Readers: Quite a number of people seem to be annoyed by the final chapter in the Animorphs story. There are a lot of complaints that I let Rachel die. That I let Visser Three/One live. That Cassie and Jake broke up. That Tobias seems to have been reduced to unexpressed grief. That there was no grand, final fight-to-end-all-fights. That there was no happy celebration. And everyone is mad about the cliffhanger ending. So I thought I’d respond. Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones. That’s what happens, so that’s what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn’t by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it’s a start. Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating. There’s very little chanting of ‘we’re number one’ among people who’ve personally experienced war. I’m just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I’ve never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn’t going to do it at the end. I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war. So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents. If you’re mad at me because that’s what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn’t have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers. K.A. Applegate —K.A. Applegate about the ending of Animorphs and stressing the fact of it being anti-war series.