Quotes about war - myBookQuotes

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

-George Orwell, 1984

tags freedom, iconic, perception, war

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

tags war

“Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.”

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

tags religion, short, war

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags evil, long, war

“But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags memory, war

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags bravery, iconic, war

“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, The Things They Carried

tags war

“He wished he could’ve explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags bravery, war

“It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags knowledge, politics, war

“It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.”

-Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

tags fear, war