Heinrich Boll Quotes

War is always a very blunt instrument and almost always produces uncertain results.

When you start a military intervention, you do not know what will happen even in the next hour

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

There is nothing so subject to the inconstancy of fortune as war.

War is uncertain, precisely because it is political and human.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end; it has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes.

Nevertheless, China was unfortunately unable to understand Japan's real position, and it is greatly to be regretted that the Sino-Japanese War became one of long duration.

You cannot make peace with terrorists. The normal dividing lines between war and peace do not apply.

The events of war are subject to great uncertainty.

No man could know whether war might not at any moment break out.

In war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities …. all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

Wars and revolutions cannot be prescribed and the circle of their influence determined in advance.

The unknown is the governing condition of war.

Wars: You know how you start, but you never know how you end.

Haven’t we learned that when you go to war, the outcome is unpredictable.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Politics and war are remarkably similar situations.

Preparation for war is a constant stimulus to suspicion and ill will.

We convinced him quickly that the possibility of war was absolutely nil and continued our festivity. On the next day we were ordered to take the field.

I saw that the war could not be prevented. The time had passed.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

Whatever efforts for peace President Gorbachev had in mind, they were pretty substantially undercut very swiftly by Saddam Hussein.

When there's a war, people get married.