Top 56 Hemingway War Quotes
#1. I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us.
Ernest Hemingway,
#2. It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
Ernest Hemingway,
#3. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#5. In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.
Ernest Hemingway,
#6. Are you a communist?"
"No I am an anti-fascist"
"For a long time?"
"Since I have understood fascism.
Ernest Hemingway,
#7. I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you ... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Ernest Hemingway,
#9. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#10. Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.
Ernest Hemingway,
#11. If I were an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic, I would drink all my sorrows away. Sadness to me reminds me of Hemingway driving ambulances in the war. No way out. Sadness reminds me of Monroe. No way out.
Abigail George
#12. Why must man not marry?" "He cannot marry. He cannot marry," he said angrily. "If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas. But now I look forward till when our son will be a lieutenant commander.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not
completely trust anyone.
Ernest Hemingway,
#15. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#16. The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway,
#17. It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war."
Defeat is worse."
I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.
Ernest Hemingway,
#18. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.
J.G. Ballard
#19. They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway,
#20. Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. Let's drop the war.'
'It's very hard. There's no place to drop it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#23. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway,
#24. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it anymore.
Ernest Hemingway,
#25. The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.
Ernest Hemingway,
#26. I believe that all the people who stand to profit by a war and who help provoke it should be shot on the first day it starts by accredited representatives of the loyal citizens of their country who will fight it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#27. To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
Ernest Hemingway,
#29. In a war we must all be careful not to hurt each other's feelings.
Ernest Hemingway,
#30. Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.
Ernest Hemingway,
#32. Be a damn fire eater now. He'd seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.
Ernest Hemingway,
#33. He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war.
Ernest Hemingway,
#34. The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn't any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.
Ernest Hemingway,
#35. One battle doesn't make a campagin, but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole war.
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like nothing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull.
Ernest Hemingway,
#38. For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
Ernest Hemingway,
#39. perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war.
Ernest Hemingway,
#40. The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.
Clive Owen
#41. The reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.
Ernest Hemingway,
#42. Then he was sorry for the great fish ... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.
Ernest Hemingway,
#44. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else's college.
Ernest Hemingway,
#47. World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.
Ernest Hemingway,
#49. The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
Ernest Hemingway,
#50. You never kill anyone you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
Ernest Hemingway,
#51. The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#52. We think. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates war.
There is a class that control a country that is stupid and down not realise anything and never can. That is why we have this war.
Also they make money out of it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#53. As Ernest Hemingway wrote, 'Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead ... '
Christopher Flynn
#54. Named Harris," Bill said. "Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too."
"Fortunate fellow," Mike said. "What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.
Ernest Hemingway,
#55. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady
Ernest Hemingway,
#56. I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.
Ernest Hemingway,
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