Robert Fisk Quotes

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

It makes twenty years or more of peace to make a man. It takes only twenty seconds of war to destroy him.

There are only two ways to come back from the battlefield: With the head of an enemy or without your own.

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

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

Resort to force in the Great War (I) failed to bring tranquillity. Victory and defeat alike were sterile. That lesson the world should have learned.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

I'm not sentimental about war. I see nothing noble in widows.

War is a series of disasters which result in a winner.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction.