Nothing gets us down more than watching violence on television or reading about war and brutality in the newspaper. The truth is, there's a massive reduction in the amount of violence around the world.
The theoretically unrestricted right to develop power, to wage war against other states, is antisocial and is doubly dangerous, because the state as a mass entity represents a low moral and intellectual level.
We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challen...
I was trying in 'The Power of the Dog' to write a brutally accurate in-your-face, if you will, description of 30 years in the war on drugs. And the effect that that had on people.
Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening...
Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.
Milosevic will never stop, because he is fighting for personal power in Serbia. The only way to stop him is cutting the functioning of his war machine. He is spending $1.7 million a day on his war machine in Kosovo.
War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.
War is at its best barbarism.
Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some e...
World War II proves there's no God.
We want to keep the actual Civil War experience alive.
My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression ...
War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war.
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.
Experience has shown how deeply the seeds of war are planted by economic rivalry and social injustice.
As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.
I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.
Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
