Bruce Cockburn Quotes

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.

Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries.

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

There are lots of countries that are having these kinds of internal civil wars in other parts of the world and nobody is talking about intervening.

Whenever I speak at the United Nations, UNICEF or elsewhere to raise awareness of the continual and rampant recruitment of children in wars around the world, I come to realize that I still do not fully understand how I could have possibly survived the civil war in my country, Sierra Leone.

The fact that you had disruptions in the peace process was not only in Rwanda. We had the same problem in Cambodia, we had the same problem in Mozambique, we had the same problem in Salvador.

I think when war becomes your life, I think it's very difficult to have the proper perspective to be able to create a fully balanced policy.

I wanted to continue doing my work, but I had to figure out how. And so what I have basically come up with is that I still go to Afghanistan and Iraq and South Sudan and many of these places that are rife with war, but I don't go directly to the front line.

There was never a good war, or a bad peace.

War is the ultimate tool of politics.

No war is inevitable until it breaks out.

Before journalism, I had worked doing medical aid work in conflict zones. Then, as a journalist, I had written about hospitals in war zones.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Police do not belong in war zones.

The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.

War is the most serious of the complicated relationships of humankind.

The most expensive peace is far less costly than the cheapest war.

It’s damn easy to get into a war, but damned harder to extricate yourself once you get in.

All wars are mishandled.

THIS WILL BE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION…. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FLIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST…. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED A LESSON. SAIGON SIGNING OFF.

Anybody who has experienced war will never want to do it again unless they have to. But if we’re going to do it, we have to be damn good at it.

Nations drift into wars.

Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it's not highly unusual.

Surely our inaction with respect to Syria is a poor precedent if we're fighting a war on terror.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.