war awareness Quotes

Unless war is made something real for the Englishman in his own country, this robber and murderer will not recognize what it means for other people. Since the forces of [Dutch 17th century Admiral] de Ruyter, nobody has exploded a single bomb on England’s doorstep.

I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.

It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

You aren’t quite serious in America yet. You haven’t got the war right under your chins.

I'm not ambitious. I don't want to get anywhere, I don't want anything more. I sometimes think that for me that is the real freedom, that I don't want anything. I don't want money or prizes. I want people to know that a war is going to be fought.

It is only tradition that keeps men from being even more vitally interested in peace than women for they are the first line of defense. Luckily the youth of the nation, both men and women, are recognizing this fact.

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.

I think it's very uncomfortable for people to talk to children about war, and so they don't because it's easier not to. But then you have young people at eighteen who are enlisting in the army, and they really don't have the slightest idea what they're getting into.

I only find out where countries are when we start bombing them.

I think that we see war as a virtual thing and we even get to believe that bombs fall on top of cardboard cutouts and stuff like that. They don't. They kill real people, real children, real mothers and millions of innocent people.

Our country regularly uses military force, but only a fraction of Americans serve in the military. This means fewer and fewer people have a direct link to the military, and yet it remains as important as ever that we have a rich understanding of what we are doing as a country.

There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.

Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is - and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

Even as a little kid, I was fascinated by newspapers and magazines. They were my TV. I'd be the first one up to grab the morning paper, mainly to look at the sports pictures, the war pictures.

I'm not sure that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know that we're at war.

I don't need the news. If they have a war, I figure someone will tell me.

I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.

If a President must constantly remind the people that we're at war, then we're not.

War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

I was very careful to send Mr. Roosevelt every few days a statement of our casualties. I tried to keep before him all the time the casualty results because you get hardened to these things and you have to be very careful to keep them always in the forefront of your mind.

I believe that the fighters know. It's just the people not actually fighting who need to understand more that we're putting our lives on the line.

There's a big thing in Canada that parents need to talk to their children about drugs and sex. I don't think talking to your kids about war is any less important than that.