Quotes About Civilians In War

#1. Al Qaeda is not a nation-state and it has not signed the Geneva Conventions. It shows no desire to obey the laws of war; if anything it directly violates them by disguising themselves as civilians and attacking purely civilian targets to cause massive casualties.

John Yoo

#2. Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or 'the people,' constitute the great majority of those affected.

Martin Van Creveld

#3. There are far more statues of soldiers out there than there are of civilians.

George Armstrong Custer

#4. Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.

Nancy Gibbs

#5. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Kurt Vonnegut

#6. I disagreed with the conduct of the war, with bombing civilians, categorizing everyone as the enemy or simply as armed men, with the racism and the disregard for those people.

Joe Glenton

#7. The tragedy of civil wars in countries like Angola and Mozambique is that they left many civilians maimed. Poverty is the reason HIV/AIDS spread so rapidly in the African townships and slums. Poverty is the real killer.

Miriam Makeba

#8. The very nature of interstate war puts innocent civilians into great jeopardy, especially with modern technology.

Murray Rothbard

#9. It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict ... There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex - everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.

Angelina Jolie

#10. I believe the United States should make the protection of Syrian civilians from war crimes and crimes against humanity a higher priority.

Bob Casey Jr.

#11. I wouldn't characterize anybody who fought in Vietnam as a war hero. In 23 bombing sorties, there must have been civilians that were killed and there's no heroism to that.

Medea Benjamin

#12. I would wager that the number of civilians that were killed [in] a typical week under Saddam Hussein was probably more than we killed during the weeks we were at war there.

Bill Maher

#13. I took a trip in 2004, a year after the war started in Iraq. I played music on the streets of Baghdad for Iraqi civilians. I'd also play for U.S. soldiers at night when they were off duty in the bars. Then I would talk to people, and I would film them and ask them about their life and the conflict.

Michael Franti

#14. It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes.

Noam Chomsky

#15. Since 2006, when the Second Lebanon War killed perhaps 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and led to the destruction of an entire section of Beirut, the northern border has been absolutely quiet.

Martin Van Creveld

#16. The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#17. The United States that has been involved first in the Gulf War and then in the tremendously damaging sanctions against Iraqi civilians. The United States that is the supporter of Israel against the Palestinians.

Edward Said

#18. The institutions founded 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war' have failed. Since the end of WW2, some thirty million people have been killed in armed conflict. Most of them were civilians.

George Monbiot

#19. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians.

Alberto Gonzales

#20. The use of the blockade against Germany to starve large numbers of people to death broke through the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians. It was the precedent for the 'conventional' bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.

Jonathan Glover

#21. It seems like such a terrible shame that innocent civilians have to get hurt in wars, otherwise combat would be such a wonderfully healthy way to rid the human race of unneeded trash.

Fred Woodworth

#22. Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is - and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

Jon Stewart

#23. Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

John O. Brennan

#24. Let's stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.

Widad Akreyi

#25. Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

Max Von Sydow

#26. Osama bin Laden's own words stated he has a war against the United States. He declared that American civilians should be considered as combatants.

Cofer Black

#27. All those involved in the firebombing of Tokyo .. were war criminals interviews recorded in the movie The Fog of War.. the firebombing of Tokyo occurred before the atom bombs.. 100,000 civilians died in one night from American bombs.. 500,000 altogether over several days say some.

Robert McNamara

#28. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

John Hersey

#29. Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.

Noam Chomsky

#30. They say a good soldier fights a battle, never a war. That's for civilians.

John Steinbeck

#31. A phased decision can avoid there being a key moment when the moral issue about killing civilians has to be confronted.

Jonathan Glover

#32. The war against terrorism should not be used to interfere with an independent, sovereign state. We need to identify concrete terrorist targets and do no harm to civilians.

Nong Duc Manh

#33. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.

Marie Colvin

#34. The longer the war drags on, more and more civilians are getting killed.

Sergey Akhromeyev

#35. Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except ... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

Phil Klay

#36. Peace is a fulltime job. It's protecting civilians, overseeing elections, and disarming ex-combatants. Peace, like war, must be waged.

George Clooney

#37. To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

Janine Di Giovanni

#38. ISIS BEHEADS CIVILIANS WHILE WORLD KEEPS FORGETTING WHAT VICTIMS' SOULS R BEGGING:
HUMANITY SAVE KOBANE

Widad Akreyi

#39. It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.

Tiffany Madison

#40. Peace ... is a morbid condition, due to a surplus of civilians, which war seeks to remedy.

Cyril Connolly

#41. The Russians would lose 305,000 troops in the last 42 miles approaching Berlin
about the number of American army soldiers who died in all of World War II. Of the 125,000 of Berlin's civilians who died in the Russian attack, 6,400 were suicides;

Andrei Cherny

#42. The only place you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I (in contrast) don't give a damn. I don't care." ... "I'd rather use the nuclear bomb ... Does that bother you? I just want you to think big.

Richard M. Nixon

#43. Even during the years of the Cold War, the intense confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, we always avoided any direct clash between our civilians and, most certainly, between our military.

Vladimir Putin

#44. England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.

Robert Graves

#45. The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but "accessory" in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.

Robert Graves

#46. We are at war to liberate Iraq, to protect the people of the United States and other countries from the devastating impact of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists or the Iraqi government to kill thousands of innocent civilians.

Paul Cellucci

#47. A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody.

William J. Clinton

#48. It's angering that not everybody has signed this treaty to ban landmines. It's disgusting, it really is, because it is fact that (mines) hurt a high percentage of civilians. They're not effective in any other real way. They've enough weapons for war.

Angelina Jolie

#49. Maybe you didn't understand American foreign policy or why we were at war. Maybe you never will. But it doesn't matter. You held up your hand and said, "I'm willing to die for these worthless civilians.

Phil Klay

#50. It's never acceptable to target civilians. It violates the Geneva Accords, it violates the international law of war and it violates all principles of morality.

Alan Dershowitz

#51. I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE
AND THANK EVERYONE
WHO TRIES TO MAKE
A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES
OF VULNERABLE CIVILIANS

Widad Akreyi

#52. Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.

Iain M. Banks

#53. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War, 5 percent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 percent, while in a Third World War 90-95 percent would be civilians.

Colin Ward

#54. In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.

M.F. Moonzajer

#55. After the war, they took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately, and let em sink or swim.

Audie Murphy

#56. And there's this talk that we're asking soldiers to make the greatest sacrifice, but the reality is that civilians bear the burden of war more than the combatants. You're much more likely to get accidentally blown up or killed by a death squad than you are to die in a firefight.

Michael Hastings

#57. If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.

Sebastian Junger

#58. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

Ann Coulter

#59. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians ought, under all circumstances, to be illegal in war as in peacetime.

Gijs De Vries

#60. My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war - civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel.

Lynsey Addario

#61. Flacks for both war-obsessed governments immediately blamed the other side for the deaths of the civilians.

Colman McCarthy