War Is Hell/Quotes
Anime & Manga
War is not heroic. War is not exhilarating. —Izuru Kira, Bleach
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"In the battlefield, there is no place for hope. What lies there is only cold despair and a sin called victory, built on the pain of the defeated. All those people who met there have wholeheartedly admitted the evil and foolishness of this act called 'war'. As long as people don't repent and don't regard it as the most evil taboo, then hell would endlessly reappear in the world."
—Emiya Kiritsugu, Fate/Zero
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"Since the war started, they were the first to lose their lives. But you were there too, commanding in the midst of fighting. Peasants that were cheerfully delivering milk until yesterday, return all banged up today. Every day. Until the war ends, it will continue day in and day out. Can you really handle that?"
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Comic Books
Listen, you folks at home... Today we won a piece of Sov-Cities' dirt. So what? Three good men died for it - that's what matters. Sometimes war is necessary - but don't ever let creeps like this one tell you it's fun. |
Music
"War! What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!"
—Edwin Starr
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Western Animation
"War is stupid."
—Doug
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Video Games
"War... |
"Captain's report February 4th, 2531. Five years, five long years. That's how long it took us to get Harvest back..At first it was going well. Then setback after setback..Loss after loss...Made what was going to be a quick and decisive win..Into five years of Hell...Of course that's all Harvest is today..It's hell down there..But it's ours again."
—Captain James Cutter, Halo Wars
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War is never really won by anyone who participates in it. War simply rearranges the way things were and steals the promise of tomorrow from each side. To succeed at war you have to lose a part of your humanity. After you win enough wars, you have no humanity left because you lost a piece of it each time you killed someone.
—Major Leon James, MechWarrior 2
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"Five years ago, I lost 30,000 men in the blink of an eye, and the world just fucking watched. Tomorrow there will be no shortage of volunteers, no shortage of patriots. I know you understand."
—General Shepherd, Modern Warfare 2
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Unsorted
"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war."
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"In war...there are no winners."
—Ramman Kenoun
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"Kill the enemy....Dress it up however you want, that's what war is about. If there's glory in there somewhere, I must have missed it."
—Jake, Animorphs
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"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
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"Nothing but a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."
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"In war, there are no unwounded soldiers."
—Jose Narosky
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"War does not determine who is right -- only who is left."
—Bertrand Russell
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"There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."
—General William Tecumseh Sherman
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"Wars not make one great."
—Yoda, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
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"War is sweet to them that know it not."
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"Hey! ...War is dumb."
—Sgt. Slaughter, Motivational Speaker
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"In a recent battle Player X completely destroyed Player Y's ship. The moment Player Y tried to flee he was vaporized by Player X's shots. —GNN, Pardus
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"Up at the front you're alive or you're dead, and that's all! You can't fool anybody about that very long. Up there we know we're lost and done for whether we're dead or alive. Three years we've had of it... four years. Every day a year and every night a century. Our bodies are earth and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death."
—Paul Bäumer, All Quiet on the Western Front (film)
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"This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
—All Quiet on the Western Front (epigraph)
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"There was a little girl. Maybe, eight years old? I dunno. She'd lost both her legs. Just kept staring at them. Little stumps, cauterized by fire somehow. A little girl, all alone, looking at where her legs were, not understanding anything. Just . . . staring. Blank little eyes. Staring."
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"They built Shepard Stadium about 2011 for sports shows. They upgraded it in 2019 as a makeshift shelter in case of ion storms. Capacity was about forty thousand people. Three weeks into TW 3, it was filled with three hundred thousand. —Anonymous GDI medical worker, Tiberium Wars
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"We forge futures out of pain and grief, Commander. The computers and the communications officers and the EVAs and the displays only serve to isolate us so we can be inhuman. We're monsters, son. Cold, mechanical, rational monsters, and the only way we win is by being colder, more mechanical, and more rational than the next monster moving his little pieces on the screen. That's how war has been fought since Stalin rolled into the Allies a century ago. You point, you click, and they die. It's how it works."
—Colonel Nick Parker, Tiberium Wars "Chapter XVIII"
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"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace —Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est
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"I confess, without shame, I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands and fathers ... tis only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation."
—General William Tecumseh Sherman
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So how do y'do, Private William McBride —Eric Bogle, "No Man's Land" (often known as "Green Fields of France" or "Willie McBride")
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"Now arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. Therefore they who have the Tao do not like to employ them. |
"Hear the sound of the machine gun |
al-Jilani: Sources claim you were at the heart of the Presidium during the Battle of the Citadel. It's fair to say the course of the battle hinged on your words. If true, you told Admiral Hackett to assist the Destiny Ascension, costing hundreds of human lives and securing the continued dominance of the Citadel Council. —Mass Effect 2
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"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."
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Ace Ventura: War is hell. The last thing we want is a fight. —Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls
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It was war, you dumb kid. Everybody I liked got killed, and most of the folks I'd just as soon have shot made it out with medals on their chests. It wasn't fair and it sure as hell wasn't any fun.
—Cherie Priest, Boneshaker
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You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
—Bumper sticker
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Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
—William T. Sherman
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Only the dead have seen the end of war.
—George Santayana, Soliloquy #25, "Tipperary"[2]
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Betty has gone too far. Killing is wrong. And bad. There should be a new, stronger word for killing, like "badwrong", or "badong". Yes, killing is badong. From this point forward, I shall stand for the opposite of killing...gnodab.
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Glory is just memory putting a brave face on horror.
—Anonymous, from a Napoleonic War vet
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"Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They’ve heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. —Septon Meribald, A Feast for Crows
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A sweet thing to him who does not know it but to him who has made trial of it it is a thing of fear
— Ancient Greek poet, Pindar.
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It wasn’t different: but if we died —Randall Jarrell, poet and airman
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