War Context Quotes

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

In 'The King's Speech,' patriotism is utterly contained within a historical moment, the third of September, 1939, where the aggressor is clear, the fight is clear, it hasn't become complicated over time.

Palestine isn't a state when it concerns statehood. When it comes to warring, it's a state, yes? The Palestinians, they live in a country, for the purpose of war.

In such a climate, no one who held a position of responsibility in the Manhattan Project could doubt that we were trying to perfect a weapon that, however repugnant to us as human beings, could nonetheless save untold numbers of American lives.

We must all realise that the Israeli society is a military society - men and women. We cannot describe the society as civilian .... they are not civilians or innocent.

First off, we've had sworn testimony from soldiers and testimony before our staff that wasn't sworn, that said these alarms rarely went off, that they went off after the war in most cases and went off a lot.

If you've ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.

It is the object only of war that makes it honorable.

On the last day of January 1915, in the second year of the Great War, down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into this world.

David Ben-Gurion established the Israeli intelligence community in June of 1948, just three weeks after the establishment of Israel and in the midst of war.

It has to be an actress like Marion Cotillard [in Allied] because there are so many levels to it. It's set in the Second World War, when lots of people were doing things that, outside of a war, you wouldn't do, like killing and dropping bombs. She's doing things that one wouldn't approve of, but it's war.

It's not that I don't enjoy fighting. I don't enjoy the circumstances around fighting.

A country unpeopled and most unknown in the last war [French & Indian War] … it now abounds in the most active and most rebellious race of the continent, and hangs like a gathering storm on my left.

Pinkville was called Pinkville because in the military maps, it was shaded a bright kind of shimmering pink, which signified what was called on the maps a 'built up' area, which was extremely misleading - 'built up' only meant there were little villages and it wasn't just desolate paddy land or unpopulated.

I really think that if I had met Picasso during peacetime, nothing would have happened.

Our vision of war is probably too influenced by the biggest one of all, World War II, where the forces of evil were so unambiguous and so relentless that there was no choice but to commit to total war and to demand unconditional surrender. Seldom, though, is it quite that clear cut.

If we go to Chihuahua we must be considered as prisoners of war?

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

Rock 'n' roll was two pegs below being a prisoner of war back then.

You know, if you didn't pay close attention, you'd think we were the only people in Iraq and the only people fighting the terrorists.

I stopped acting when I was 19. The only time I acted again was during the war, when there were no other Nazis available.

That was not what men and women fought for during the war.

It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick [Nolte] to Albert [Finney] to Omar [Epps] to Barbara [Hershey]. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War.