Top 100 War Dead Quotes
#1. It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.
Chris Hayes
#2. Probably half the cases of Civil War dead were not identified. And so there was no way to let loved ones know, and there were no regularized processes in either Northern or Southern Army for notifying next of kin.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#3. I thought of Pericles' speech to the families of the Athenian war dead, in which he said, What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Eric Greitens
#4. It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#5. On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.
Katherine Paterson
#6. If Americans can transform Memorial Day, technically a remembrance of all our war dead ever, into the official kickoff of summer, we can handle adapting one demoralizing battle into a wholesome, chipper get-together.
Sarah Vowell
#7. I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.
Michael McCormick
#8. Let us then remember the dead-and all wars-gratefully. And let us hope that because of them we may become a touch better, a thimbleful wiser, and a handshake more tolerant of this changing world they did not live to see.
Arthur Hailey
#11. In the Twentieth Century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live. He will possess something higher than all these-a great country, the whole earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven.
Victor Hugo
#12. Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. "Victorious and dead," some muttered, "is a poor sort of victory.
M.L. Stedman
#13. I am at war with the living, I have come to terms with the dead.
Hamilcar Barca
#14. At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.
Chinua Achebe
#16. Two live grenades that nearly detonated each other. Wave the white flag and count your dead. The war is over. Nurse the wounded and heal your cuts. Write down the memories and tell the tales in later years when you can see the good with the bad.
Kate Monahan
#17. We tell the dead to rest in peace, when we should worry about the living to live in peace.
Anthony Liccione
#18. The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column.
Andrew Sullivan
#19. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#20. You are familiar with World War 2?"
"Of course I am. I'm dead, not stupid.
Donna Augustine
#21. Much of the blame is the malarkey that artists have created to glorify war, which as we all know, is nonsense, and a good deal worse than that - romantic pictures of battle, and of the dead and men in uniform and all that. And I did not want to have that story told again.
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.
William Shakespeare
#23. So let them pass, small people of no great significance, caught up and swept together like dead leaves in the great whirlwind of the war.
Nevil Shute
#26. 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
#27. Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough then we saw thousands were still too few and today we can't even count all the dead Everywhere you look.
Peter Weiss
#28. I just remember, all I'm doing is remembering when I was a kid I remember that they used to put out there in the old west, a wanted poster. It said: "Wanted, Dead or Alive." All I want and America wants him brought to justice. That's what we want.
George W. Bush
#29. Oh, the naive Obama State Department. They say we can't kill our way out of war. Really? Tell that to the Nazis. Oh wait, you can't. They're dead. We killed 'em.
Sarah Palin
#30. I'm into zombie movies like 'World War Z' and the shows 'Breaking Bad' and 'The Walking Dead.'
Phillip Phillips
#31. What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi
#32. I was only one woman alone, and had no power to move to action full-fed, sleek- coated, ease-loving, pleasure-seeking, well-paid,and well-placed countrymen in this war- trampled, dead, old land, each one afraid that he should be called upon to do something.
Clara Barton
#34. Dear Artie: "The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. "Roy
John Pearce
#35. Rather than concede to the state of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my government in any matter however unimportant, I would see you, and you, and you, and you, and every man, woman and child in the state, dead and buried. This means war.
Nathaniel Lyon
#36. War, for most women, is about the destiny of one person. For me, it became three - the one I feared was dead, and the two of you who now are.
Phyllis Edgerly Ring
#37. 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
#38. Marvelous, isn't it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they're fucking dead.
Ken Follett
#39. The expression on her face was one the trooper would never forget: it was the look of someone still alive who realizes she's already dead
Alan Dean Foster
#40. Everyday somebody dies... in combat, in war in battle... in game everwhere... so far nowhere is safety as you think.... I can tell you fom here what you think is wrong.... (What can you do about that??)
Deyth Banger
#41. But it seemed so wrong, so scandalous, somehow so unreligious for a dead man to have to keep on fighting - or running, anyhow - that it made me sick at my stomach. I didn't want to have any more to do with the war if this was the way it was going to be
Shelby Foote
#42. 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
#43. I'm more of a warrior than you'll ever be. I believe in the class war. I believe in the battle of the sexes. I believe in my tribe. I believe in the righteous, intelligent clued-up section of the working classes against the brain-dead moronic masses as well as the mediocre, soulless bourgeoisie.
Irvine Welsh
#44. Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.
Bryan Fischer
#45. In our world photographs of one dead terrorist mastermind carry no real news or information about the nature or horror of war. They just create sensation instead of deeper understanding.
Philip Gourevitch
#47. Recall the cold
Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,
Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets
Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled
Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's
Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.
Geoffrey Hill
#48. Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.
James A. Garfield
#49. When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries," she said, "there'll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.
Nevil Shute
#51. Peace
We passed their graves:
The dead men there,
Winners or losers,
Did not care.
In the dark
They could not see
Who had gained
The victory.
Langston Hughes
#53. Before we become too arrogant with the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, the sin of pride, let us remember that the two great wars of this century, wars which cost twenty million dead, were fought between Christian nations praying to the same God.
Richard M. Nixon
#54. I have seen men march to the wars, and then I have watched their homeward tread, and they brought back bodies of living men, But their eyes were cold and dead.
Edmund Vance Cooke
#55. Right, he can kill the dead. What happens when he realizes we're training him to kill the living?
Robert Kirkman
#56. During the war, I promised the dead I would never forget them. I stared at them, barely able to move myself. Pretended I was one of them. To this day I can recall the light in the ruins.
Chris Bohjalian
#57. Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Plato
#58. The fire was extinguished, and sniper fire had ceased. Nobody will budge, they were all dead. And the wind swept across jagged rocks, without a song of reconciliation.
Kristian Goldmund Aumann
#59. If the tears I've shed for my fallen comrades and this nation were blood I'd be dead ...
Stanley Victor Paskavich
Disabled Gulf War Veteran
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#60. I often think it would be really interesting to take all of those who would wage war to the battlefield cemeteries, and say, explain yourself to the dead. Explain yourself to the dead!
Jacqueline Winspear
#61. When children's children shall talk of War as a madness that may not be; When we thank our God for our grief today, and blazon from sea to sea In the name of the Dead the banner of Peace ... that will be Victory.
Robert W. Service
#62. I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
Catherynne M Valente
#63. The day is won [ ... ] And yet you do not smile, boy. The living should smile, for the dead cannot.
George R R Martin
#64. A lot of blood,
A lot of dead people,
A lot of victims,
A lot of useless battles,
A lot of predictable battles, so far what's next?
As far as now I suggest to change the road, it's too messy this road in which all are walking. Somebody will fall...
Deyth Banger
#65. Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy;
Barbara W. Tuchman
#66. But, ladies and gentlemen, we will also be asked to make sacrifices in matters that are not our affair and that do not concern us, sacrifices that would leave our people bleeding or wounded, or even dead, from battle. There is no equality for us in this lifetime.
Allan Dare Pearce
#67. Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.
Omar N. Bradley
#68. I looked inside, compelled to stare, staining the image of a dead body into my memory. I did not deserve to look away. I had to know the awfulness of war; the wickedness of our species.
Jeffrey Sands
#69. It's always the same war. Only the names of the dead change. It's always about one thing: which group of rich men get to divvy up the spoils. They call it 'The Great War' - clever marketing.
A.G. Riddle
#70. Not even the dead know the end to war.
-Iskar Jarak
Steven Erikson
#71. A dead war horse is the single most expensive corpse you'll ever see.
Christian Cameron
#72. A DEAD STATESMAN
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
from EPITAPHS OF THE WAR 1914-18
Rudyard Kipling
#73. How can we preserve our planet on which little girls are supposed to sleep in their beds, and not lie dead on the road with unplaited pigtails? And so that childhood would never again be called war-time childhood.
Svetlana Alexievich
#75. I once played a sheriff who thought he could do the job without a gun. I was dead in twenty-seven minutes of a thirty minute show.
Ronald Reagan
#76. May therefore God give us the strength to continue to do our duty and with this prayer we bow in homage before our dead heroes, before those whom they have left behind in bereavement, and before all the other victims of this war.
Adolf Hitler
#77. War is not one-sided. It takes two blades to clash. It matters little who comes out on top, there is still a dead man at the end.
Mitch Rowland
#78. What did Plato say?" "He said, 'It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.'" "And
Elizabeth Hunter
#79. One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.
Stephane Audeguy
#80. It is also asserted that the election settled the matters of the war and the torture of prisoners. These are dead issues that no longer need be addressed.
Andrew Greeley
#81. In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
Wendell Berry
#82. We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
#83. I could become a nun even if I am a non-believer. I'll learn to fake it like Nick did with me. I will minister the gospel of compassion and kindness and please, always use a condom, from famine-stricken nations to war-torn dead zones. It's possible I might become a nun who kisses other nuns ...
Rachel Cohn
#84. The atrocities of war are only overshadowed by the heroism of their dead.
Todd Stocker
#85. War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
Tim O'Brien
#86. There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
Bernard Cornwell
#87. It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.
Joseph Heller
#88. Waiting for a battle was the hardest part. Unless you got a dagger in your gut during the battle. Then that was hardest. Or you got through just fine and saw your men dead around you. Then that was.
Daniel Abraham
#89. The attack on Dresden, which was overflowing with refugees, on February 13th 1945 caused around 250,000 dead.
Konrad Adenauer
#90. War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.
Nellie L. McClung
#91. The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
John Le Carre
#92. There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.
Leonard Woolf
#93. Well, it is all over now. The battle is lost, and many of us are prisoners, many are dead, many wounded, bleeding and dying. Your Soldier lives and mourns and but for you, my darling, he would rather, a million times rather, be back there with his dead, to sleep for all time in an unknown grave.
George Pickett
#94. My dead and wounded were nearly as great in number as those still on duty. They literally covered the ground. The blood stood in puddles in some places on the rocks; the ground was soaked with the blood of as brave men as ever fell on the red field of battle.
William C. Oates
#95. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
Dalton Trumbo
#96. Red lips are not so red as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Wilfred Owen
#97. It's a dreadful assertion to make that once the war is over, the lesson learned, the conclusion drawn lies anywhere but in the verdict 'slaughter'. The dead are very quickly forgotten. But it's extraordinary - and a good thing too - how we're bested by them in this respect.
Jacques Yonnet
#98. We are scattered, stunned; the remnant of heart left alive is filled with brotherly hate ... Whose fault? Everybody blamed somebody else. Only the dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battlefield escape.
Mary Boykin Chesnut
#100. Barry remembered his dad saying that the casualties of war couldn't be counted only among the dead and the wounded.
Patrick Taylor
