Quotes About War And Death

#1. These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.

Winifred Holtby

#2. The basis of tragedy is man's helplessness against disease, war and death; the basis of comedy is man's helplessness against vanity (the vanity of love, greed, lust, power).

Dawn Powell

#3. We need more leaders among our gente - more teachers, politicians, businesspeople, organizers, and such. Turn the energy that many young people are putting into "war" and "death" and put it into life and true justice.

Luis J. Rodriguez

#4. He says we need to live in the real world, where war and death are a reality, not pretend.

Pittacus Lore

#5. Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.

Lauren Groff

#6. These warriors of the Sacred Band were inscrutable; they loved their war and death and picking through the bones of time to sort out right from wrong, good from bad, holy from profane, honor from dishonor.

Janet Morris

#7. Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation.

Winifred Holtby

#8. I crawled in a spirit-haunted place
Made wild by souls that moan and mourn;
And Death leered by with mangled face -
Ah God! I prayed, I prayed for dawn.

Arthur Newberry 1893- Choyce

#9. The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#10. The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings: But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

Julian Grenfell

#11. States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

Steven Pinker

#12. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.

Tim O'Brien

#13. In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.

George Clooney

#14. Defeating the enemy through deception with little loss of life is better than fighting face-to-face with the loss of many lives on both sides.

Aleksandra Layland

#15. Sometimes, war being the unjust and drastic creature it is, those in whom he invested hopes took an arrow in the chest, the useless, by chance, thrived to irritate him another day.

Paul Hoffman

#16. Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.

Oliver Stone

#17. Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

Lewis Mumford

#18. The way of the samurai is found in death. When it comes to either or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance.

Nabeshima Naoshige

#19. Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death.

Laini Taylor

#20. Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths - until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Vladimir Nabokov

#21. Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

Elizabeth Wein

#22. War.
Such a little word, such a depth of agony. Blood, death, conquest, starvation, plague, and horror.

David Gemmell

#23. While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind.

David R. Brower

#24. We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

Howard Zinn

#25. The genocide will not necessarily take the form of war, or death camps. Most likely it will take the form of ecocide, in which landscapes are devastated and the populations that live there slowly starve or turn upon each other savagely because there isn't enough food or water to go around.

Arundhati Roy

#26. Was there any meaning to life or to war, that two men should sit together and jump within seconds of each other and yet never meet on the ground below?

David Kenyon Webster

#27. Should we not begin to redefine patriotism? We need to expand it beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade-we call it globalization-should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?

Howard Zinn

#28. People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

Banksy

#29. All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.

Robert Lowell

#30. I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don't take zombies into consideration. I'd fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.

Jim Butcher

#31. An admiral should be put to death now and then to encourage the others.

Voltaire

#32. Armies gather in the East for the war that's soon to come. Death will march with the mark of the beast, so seek the light and walk with the Son.

Randy Travis

#33. Feel no fear before the multitude of men, do not run in panic,
but let each man bear his shield straight toward the fore-fighters,
regarding his own life as hateful and holding the dark spirits of death as dear as the radiance of the sun.

Tyrtaeus

#34. They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#35. The waves Of the mysterious death-river moaned; The tramp, the shout, the fearful thunder-roar Of red-breathed cannon, and the wailing cry Of myriad victims, filled the air.

George D. Prentice

#36. Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight. If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve.

Sun Tzu

#37. War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

Richard Flanagan

#38. Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn't matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.

Michael Anthony

#39. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right.

C.S. Lewis

#40. In an area of more than 1,000 war graves and with birdsong as the only sound, I contemplated the thin margin between life and death. If the sniper's bullet had been just two feet to one side, my father's life would have been over, aged just 27, and I would never have been born.

Michael Ashcroft

#41. I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.

D.H. Lawrence

#42. And I would like current or future politicians to make sure every avenue of diplomacy, and what you have, are exhausted before sending young men and women off to death and serious injury.

Tomas Young

#43. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.

Judith Butler

#44. We run a danger of trying to say the casualties are less than other wars or more than expected. It's just everybody matters, every person matters, and what really matters is having the strategy and the will to make sure any death is honored by achieving an objective.

George W. Bush

#45. I have read of the great wars of ages past, and men slaughtered by the tens of thousands. And we give but fleeting consideration to their deaths, for it is our nature to banish such thoughts.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#46. I am mistakes and victories and death and life. I am competent and powerful and strong, and whatever this war brings my way --even death-- I will face it like the queen I am.

Sara Raasch

#47. There was no honor in war, less in killing, and none in dying. But there was true dignity in how men comported themselves in battle. And there was always honor to be found in standing for a just cause and defending the defenseless.

Michael Scott

#48. We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.

Steven Erikson

#49. Prayer in a combat zone serves exactly the same purpose as it does in peacetime. In war, the stakes are life and death, true; but if you believe in God and in the notion of a human soul, then we are always making decisions of tremendous significance.

Phil Klay

#50. Only from chaos does order come. The angry Fates bring death where they will, when war is king, says Enlil, storm god of the armies, and the tip of his crown rends the clouds above their heads. "Wheresoever I rule, death comes shambling after. So it has always been, is, and will be."

Janet Morris

#51. People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich - don't want to buy anything

Frida Kahlo

#52. The enemy is at the gate. It is a question of life and death.

Andrei Zhdanov

#53. If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.

John Pilger

#54. I have been informed about the death of Slobodan Milosevic. It is unfortunate and in many aspects unsatisfactory, given the countless victims of the Balkan wars, that justice now will not be able to run its course.

Jaap De Hoop Scheffer

#55. The months have been good to Tiberias Calore. A life of war suits him. He seems vibrant and alive, even after narrowly escaping death on the walls.

Victoria Aveyard

#56. Humanity is as horrified and repulsed by real nature as it is by real death. Thus, we strike back against this formidable opponent with our sharpest weapon: our imagination. From this noble tool - born of necessity and elevated to beauty - culture was born, and the war against nature begun.

Anthony Marais

#57. And when the war broke out, its real horrors, its real dangers, its menace of real death were a blessing compared with the inhuman reign of the lie, and they brought relief because they broke the spell of the dead letter.

Boris Pasternak

#58. The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization ... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation

Thomas A. Edison

#59. How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

Aberjhani

#60. Jason smiled. The sound of wings was louder now, the fluttering of angels come to carry him home.

Robert Ferrigno

#61. I am an enthusiastic European, and my first-hand experience of war and hatred has strengthened that conviction. I have seen how misguided unilateral nationalistic identities have brought destruction and death. I am, however, a world citizen, too.

Klaus Schwab

#62. You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you'd run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat - coward!

Homer

#63. Acts of violence
Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death
and the meaninglessness of killing.

Dag Hammarskjold

#64. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

#65. Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

Wilfred Owen

#66. How do we keep convincing young people to die in fights they didn't start for reasons we're too devious to tell the truth about? It's way too easy for governments to spend other people's blood. Maybe only the sons and daughters of those who declare the wars should be allowed to fight and die.

Dan Groat

#67. An atheist believes that a hospital
should be built instead of a church.
An atheist believes that deed must
be done instead of prayer said.
An atheist strives for involvement in life
and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered,
poverty vanished, war eliminated.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

#68. Once supply begins to dwindle, the years to follow will see shortages that at best will cause global recession, possibly worse than the 1930s Great Depression, ... war, famine, pestilence and death.

Kenneth S. Deffeyes

#69. She imagined sometimes that kindness would come as an annihilating flood. Drown the war and us with it, recede just when we were on the edge of death. Leave us lying faceup on the ground, staring into the brilliant sky. Thankful for every breath.

Brian Francis Slattery

#70. But here's how it works: when the world has told you once too often and once and for all that you are nothing nothing nothing then you come to the conclusion that others may be nothing too.

J.W. Horton

#71. I don't want to hope for anything anymore. I don't want to pray that Max is alive and safe. Or Alex Steiner.
Because the world did not deserve them.

Markus Zusak

#72. Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case ... we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two.

Arnold J. Toynbee

#73. Fire," she whispered. "Wind. I see dark things and a dark war. I see my death coming for me, out of the spirit world. And I see you at the middle of it all. You're the beginning, the end of it. You're the one who can make the path go different ways."
"That's your vision? Iowa has less corn.

Jim Butcher

#74. If feels good to live after death. It feels good to not be dead. It feels so good to find myself alive and flying home. The music plays in my ears and I float further and further away from war. Fucking Baghdad.

Michael Hastings

#75. For the first time Saya understood how people can grow accustomed to war. Intensified by the stark contrast between life and death, fleeting moments of joy such as these could make one almost mad with happiness.

Noriko Ogiwara

#76. The unhorsing, wounding and capture of the enemy was sought, for corpses fetched little ransom, but in the blind chaos of the charge, death was a whore who did not care who she drew into her darkness, veteran knight or callow bachelor.

Robyn Young

#77. Their names are Death, Disease, War, and Sparkle-Darkle Glitter-tits," Sophie said. "They're the four little ponies of the Apocalypse.

Christopher Moore

#78. Between cold war and hot peace, our love got sterilized to death.

Natalya Vorobyova

#79. And in that very moment, away behind in some far corner of the city, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed reckoning nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#80. War is an initiation into the power of life and death. Women touch that power on the moment of birth, men at the edge of death.

William Broyles Jr.

#81. 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.

Erich Maria Remarque

#82. Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?'
If you were run over by a railroad train your death wouldn't sanctify the railroad company, would it?' asked Rhett and his voice sounded as if he were humbly seeking information.

Margaret Mitchell

#83. With a savage grin, he let out an inhuman roar of bloodlust and threw himself into an unholy orgy of blood, fangs, claws, and death.

Alan Kinross

#84. Yeah? What'd you name all those cats?" Death, Famine, Pestilence, War, and Mr. Whiskers." You named your cats after the riders of the apocal
wait. Mr. Whiskers?" Well, there are only four horsemen.

Richelle Mead

#85. And where there are shadows, there is light, Liebchen.

J.W. Horton

#86. She died in my arms saying, "I don't want to die." That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we could never have war anymore.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#87. When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

Amanda Lindhout

#88. There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

Jon Krakauer

#89. He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

Thomas Paine

#90. Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them.

Alexander The Great

#91. And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.

Bernard Cornwell

#92. War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

Aaron Huey

#93. I think of him dreaming of being married to Kim and of tractors and harvesters and conferences in nice country hotels while my dreams are filled with war, with snakes, with bloody wounds, disaster and death. I keep feeling blood trickling over my skin.

David Almond

#94. War, misery, and death spared no soul, and took pity on no family.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#95. Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another
unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.

John Green

#96. Seek only to preserve life -- your own and those of others. Life alone is sacred.

Yasuo Kuwahara

#97. It was something he had never quite understood about himself. He had seen thousands of men die in nearly ten years of war and could look on it at times with a near-total detachment, but an animal suffering - be it a horse or needra injured in battle, or the stag now dying - moved him deeply.

Raymond E. Feist

#98. The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

Sloane Crosley

#99. Almost everybody in the neighborhood had troubles, frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had complications. To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant. People struggled on for years wit

Edith Wharton

#100. They knew that love snatched in the face of danger and death was doubly sweet for the strange excitement that went with it.

Margaret Mitchell