War Tragedy Quotes

#1. It's odd, isn't it? People die every day and the world goes on like nothing happened. But when it's a person you love, you think everyone should stop and take notice. That they ought to cry and light candles and tell you that you're not alone.

Kristina McMorris

#2. It didn't take tragedy or war to derail a man. It took only a memory.

Ali Shaw

#3. War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

#4. Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it
that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

Eric Gill

#5. The calamity of war, wherever, whenever and upon whomever it descends, is a tragedy for the whole of humanity.

Raisa Gorbacheva

#6. Were prayers of murderers, when fighting on the "right side" of the war, ever heard - let alone answered?

Kristina McMorris

#7. The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

#8. 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

#9. The whole world can become the enemy when you lose what you love.

Kristina McMorris

#10. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras. I got to fully experience and appreciate both the tragedy of Somalia and the beauty of it.

K'naan

#11. Good had defeated evil, people proclaimed, a justification for atrocities best left forgotten. They would cling to this oversimplified truth while trading pats on the back and placing flowers on graves.

Kristina McMorris

#12. The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Edward Abbey

#13. We in Iraq have not descended from another planet. Just as people in many other countries have gotten over the tragedy of war, Iraq will get over its ordeal.

Hassan Blasim

#14. So does nobody care about Ireland?"
"Nobody. Neither King Louis, nor King Billie, nor King James." He nodded thoughtfully. "The fate of Ireland will be decided by men not a single one of whom gives a damn about her. That is her tragedy.

Edward Rutherfurd

#15. Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.

Leslie Jamison

#16. The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.

H.L. Mencken

#17. And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

Lester B. Pearson

#18. I think the ties to slavery and the terrible tragedy that followed the Civil War with Jim Crow and racial violence is closely linked to the Confederate flag.

William R. Ferris

#19. I stand before you tonight as a young American, a proud American, of a generation born as the Cold War receded, shaped by the tragedy of 9/11, connected by the digital revolution and determined to re-elect the man who will make the 21st century another American century - President Barack Obama.

Julian Castro

#20. It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union's most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House.

George McGovern

#21. The tragedy of war is that it uses mas's best to do man's worst.

H. E. Fosdick

#22. Imagine the wars we would've avoided if prior generations had a website where they could debate tragedy and politics in terse sentences?

Eugene Mirman

#23. It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.

Albert Camus

#24. War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

David Mamet

#25. Good pictures. Tragedy and violence certainly make powerful images. It is what we get paid for.But there is a price extracted with every such frame: some of the emotion, the vulnerability, the empathy that makes us human, is lost every time the shutter is released.

Greg Marinovich

#26. This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

Nelson Mandela

#27. War had bled color from everything, leaving nothing but a storm of gray.

Ruta Sepetys

#28. In times of war, starvation, hunger and injustice, such tragedy can only be put aside if you allow yourself to be uplifted through music, film and dance.

Emmanuel Jal

#29. We who have witnessed the obscenity of war and experienced its horror and terrible consequences have an obligation to rise above our pain and suffering and turn the tragedy of our lives into a triumph.

Ron Kovic

#30. Let us pray that the great historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.

Herman Melville

#31. The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.

Gordon S. Wood

#32. spite of the tragedy in her childhood and the ever-present press of war, she had mostly considered herself happy. There was almost always something to take delight in, if you were trying.

Laini Taylor

#33. Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it.

Rebecca Solnit

#34. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.

Vidkun Quisling

#35. Don't know when my life came to visualising intense pain and tragedy to putting it down on paper, to putting across a message of love in times of abject hate. Thank you everybody and the conspiracy of the stars for showing me this day. To many, many more books, inshallah, and to many more launches.

Simran Keshwani

#36. To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity.

Siegfried Sassoon

#37. I used to think that the Civil War was our country's greatest tragedy, but I do remember that there were some redeeming features in the Civil War in that there was some spirit of sacrifice and heroism displayed on both sides. I see no redeeming features in Watergate.

Sam Ervin

#38. Undoubtedly the war with Iraq was a tragedy. I think it was also a crime.

Tony Benn

#39. ..there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.

Masuji Ibuse

#40. To me, the Republican Party is the real great tragedy of the last 25 years because there are lot of good and decent people and a lot of good political points [that have] come from the Republican Party in the post-war period, but it has been hijacked by these fundamentalist wackos.

Alec Baldwin

#41. The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#42. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

Chris Womersley

#43. Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we'll still be heartbroken.

Asghar Farhadi

#44. I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and security, one should try to avoid it.

Henry A. Kissinger

#45. Comedy is tragedy revisited or hostility. It is mock hostility, of course, or it would be ugly; we would have a war.

Phyllis Diller

#46. It was a tragic end to a heroic life.

Chris Kyle

#47. Not every loss was confirmed by an officer at the door. Nor a telegram with the power to sink a fleet. Loss, often the worst kind, also arrived through the deafening quiet of an absence.

Kristina McMorris

#48. We're a tragedy in the making. The game of tug-of-war we're playing will end up destroying us, because she doesn't have it in her to surrender, and I can't let go.

J.M. Darhower

#49. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome.

Isabel Allende

#50. 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

#51. I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.

Norman Schwarzkopf

#52. I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.

Euripides

#53. When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

Antony Beevor

#54. Following the Second World War, we are a country of one ethnicity. After the moving of the borders, after the tragedy of the Holocaust and the murder of Polish Jews, we don't have large minority groups.

Aleksander Kwasniewski

#55. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.

Sarah Moss

#56. I photographed the entire thing in color because to photograph it in black and white would be to keep it as a tragedy. Because there is a tragic element to photographing, in this case not war, but the collapse. It was just destruction.

Joel Meyerowitz

#57. It's all a terrible tragedy. And yet, in it's details, it's great fun. And - apart from the tragedy - I've never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium.

Rupert Brooke

#58. Offering thanks in the midst of tragedy is an American tradition, . even during a bloody Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln

#59. When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

Vera Brittain