Oscar Levant Quotes

Out of your awareness you cannot become soldiers in a war because you will be able to see, with clear eyes, that you are going to kill people - people who have done no harm to you personally, people just like you. They have their children, their wives, their mothers, their old fathers to take care of - and you are killing the person just to get a gold medal. Your gun will slip out of your hand, and that will be an act of awareness. And you will feel tremendously blissful that it happened; even if you are being shot your death will be a glory, a peace, an adventure, a journey into a new world.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

A just war is in the long run far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace.

If in order to kill the enemy you have to kill an innocent, don't take the shot. Don't create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

I was handed a chocolate bar and an M-1 rifle and told to go kill Hitler.

You cannot be politically correct in a war.

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.

There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothing worth killing for

All wars are tragedies, but not all wars are sins.

I keep hearing this [expletive] thing that guns don't kill people, but people kill people. If that's the case, why do we give people guns when they go to war? Why not just send the people?

There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives." "And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?" "That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

A war is like when it rains in New York and everybody crowds into doorways. They all get chummy together perfect strangers. The only difference, of course, is in a war it's also raining on the other side of the street and the people who are chummy over there are trying to kill the people who are over here who are chums.

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

They put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the Yellow man.

It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

There's a consensus out that it's OK to kill when your government decides who to kill. If you kill inside the country you get in trouble. If you kill outside the country, right time, right season, latest enemy, you get a medal.

There is one hell of a difference between fighting in the ring and going to war in Vietnam.

You can be killed just as dead in an unjustified war as you can in one protecting your own home.

As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.

War is death's feast.

Morally it makes no difference whether a person is killed in war or condemned to starve by the indifference of others.

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.

I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?