Tim O'Brien Quotes

It's one thing to say you're for the war; it's another thing to send your kid to war - your daughter or your son.

The accounting of the sacrifice is, more than anything else, the attitude toward war memorials in our time.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

I think that you can honour the sacrifices of a common soldier without glorifying war.

Your King and Country need you.

Men go to war for fear, honor or interest.

Nobody wants to go to war, but the burden of service cannot fall only on volunteers who, are attracted to the military for financial reasons.

I can tell you this: If I'm ever in a position to call the shots, I'm not going to rush to send somebody else's kids into a war.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

Should I be the happy mortal destined to turn the scale of war, will you not rejoice, O my father?

You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

I am one of the million or more male residents of the United Kingdom, who a year ago had no special yearning towards military life, but who joined the army after war was declared.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.

My family has served the country in almost every major war since the Civil War.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

I'm glad I never went to war.

The weeping voices rise straight up and strike the clouds. A passer-by at the roadside asks a conscript why, The conscript answers only that drafting happens often.

The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.