War
Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.
Joan of Arc
War is the national industry of Prussia.
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. Attrib.
When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.
Afghan saying
It’s God’s responsibility to forgive Bin Laden … it’s our responsibility to arrange the meeting.
Slogan on a US marine’s bumper sticker
If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
US diplomat Charles W. Freeman
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Groucho Marx
Military justice is to justice, as military music is to music.
Groucho Marx
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce
They’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
Curtis E. LeMay
War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
C.E. Montague, Disenchantment
But when we open our dykes, the waters are 10ft deep.
Queen Wilhelmina replying to a boast by Wilhelm II that all his guardsmen were 7ft tall
Götterdämmerung without the gods.
Dwight Macdonald on the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
It’s easy to be brave from a distance.
Aesop
Peace: in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the base,
And speed glum heroes up to the line of death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. ‘Poor young chap,’
I’d say – ‘I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in this last scrap.’
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.
Siegfried Sassoon, Counter-Attack, ‘Base Details’
To save your world you asked this man to die: Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W.H. Auden, Epitaph for an Unknown Soldier
This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.
David Lloyd George on the First World War
Patriots always talk of dying for their country, and never of killing for their country.
Bertrand Russell
A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men’s iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural thing.
William Godwin
Seven months ago I could give a single command and 541,000 people would immediately obey it. Today I can’t get a plumber to come to my house.
H. Norman Schwarzkopf III, Commander of US forces in the Gulf War
Lions led by donkeys.
Max Hoffmann on the British army in the First World War
Suez – a smash and grab raid that was all smash and no grab.
Harold Nicolson
Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win.
US General Thomas Power, Head of Strategic Air Command
Standing at the head of his troops, his drawn salary in his hand.
Henry Labouchère on the Duke of Clarence
The scum of the earth.
Duke of Wellington on the British army
These boys have fought for four years. They deserve their fun.
Joseph Stalin on reports of the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers
Marijuana smokers, drug addicts, long-hairs, homosexuals and unionists.
General Augusto Pinochet, describing the West German army
This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.
Extract from Royal Navy and Marines Fitness Report, 1997
He never commanded more than ten men in his life – and he ate three of them.
General Weston on Adolphus Greely being made a general. Much of his life had been spent as an Arctic explorer.
He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.
Donald Trump on John McCain
He would kill his own mother just so that he could use her skin to make a drum to beat his own praises.
Margot Asquith on Winston Churchill
If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.
Margot Asquith
In defeat unbeatable; in victory unbearable.
Winston Churchill on Viscount Montgomery
Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.
Winston Churchill
The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
George Bernard Shaw
One to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.
Herbert Asquith, explaining why the War Office kept three sets of figures
You can’t say civilization don’t advance, however, for in every war they kill you a new way.
Will Rogers, Autobiography
What have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter and barren in the summer; an island which not even the Southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future buccaneers.
Samuel Johnson on the Falkland Islands
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
Jorge Luis Borges on the Falklands War
To all the Libyan people, the Libyan land belongs to you. Those who are trying to take it away from you are outsiders, they are mercenaries. They are dogs. They are spies for France and Britain. They are all germs and rats.
Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, having been driven out of Tripoli
Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary on concerns about al-Qaeda (April 2001)
Imperialist running dogs.
Approved Chinese term for Americans in print and on radio
They present themselves to the public as superheroes, but away from the camera are a bit pathetic in many ways: street kids drunk on ideology and power. In France we have a saying – stupid and evil. I found them more stupid than evil. That is not to understate the murderous potential of stupidity.
Nicolas Hénin, French journalist and former ISIS hostage on his former captors
Maybe it would have been better if neither of us had been born.
Napoléon Bonaparte, looking at the tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau