I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!
But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere." "'They?' Who are 'they?'" "I don't know. Just people." "That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifi...
This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one.
Borkin: Ladies and gentlemen, why are you so glum? Sitting there like a jury after it's been sworn in! ... Let's think up something. What would you like? Forfeits, tug of war, catch, dancing, fireworks?
I had a dream about you. We couldn't decide on a sunrise. You wanted a tan, I only cared about the view. Then World War III fulfilled both our desires.
Look, this is helping me out quite a bit, but could you just get to the punishment part? We're at the end of World War Two in history, and I can't wait to find out who wins.
My dad once told me that his biggest challenge after returning from Vietnam had been coming to terms with his own callousness. He’d made a deal with the war and traded his humanity for a ticket home.
The fear of death is why we build cathedrals, have children, declare war, and watch cat videos online at three a.m.
I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath." the Great Comanche war chief, Ten Bears
Though there had yet to be a victor in this great war that had begun almost three years ago, Maurice had written to her that they had, all of them, on all sides, lost their freedom. Freedom to think hopefully of the future.
It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one's own people.
When both sides of a controversy revel in the defeat and humiliation of the other side, in fact they are on the same side: the side of war.
Before I met the Jesuits, I’d never encountered another group who thought that intellect and arrogance were treasures beyond price and necessities in waging wars against blasphemers, heretics.
I became a marine mom with the signing of a paper, but it would take a phone call, late one night, for me to fully absorb the impact this new title would have on my life.
Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world. (p. 160)
Too much coffee has been spilled in the name of war. Let us love and savor every drop.
On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.
[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average le...
This world is so full of wars and hostilities. All parties seek for allies to defeat enemies. I support peace effort towards mastermind which has caused men hostile to each other.
