War Culture Quotes

The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture.

War is America's central liturgical act necessary to renew our sense that we are a nation unlike other nations.

Until we have created a romance of peace that would equal that of war, violence will not disappear from people's lives.

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.

You must understand that Americans are a warrior nation.

I can't rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature.

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

In the Middle East, a nation whose youngsters are not willing to kill and get killed for it is a nation on borrowed time. It will not last long.

As a mode of public pedagogy, a state of permanent war needs willing subjects to abide by its values, ideology, and narratives of fear and violence. Such legitimation is largely provided through a market-driven culture addicted to the production of consumerism, militarism and organized violence, largely circulated through various registers of popular culture that extend from high fashion and Hollywood movies to the creation of violent video games and music concerts sponsored by the Pentagon.

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

Women don't go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.

War is not inherent in human beings. We learn war and we learn peace. The culture of peace is something which is learned, just as violence is learned and war culture is learned.

The market-driven spectacle of war demands a culture of conformity, quiet intellectuals and a largely passive republic of consumers.

The Ice Nation is a pretty brutal place. They breed war heroes. The relationship between mother and child, in that world, is a little bit different than it is in our own society. But, no one really likes being a disappointment to their parents and their family.

From the time an Aiel boy becomes a man he will not sing anything but battle chants, or their dirge for the slain. I have heard them singing over their dead, and over those they have killed. That song is one to make the stones weep.

I think the culture of Civil War re-enacting is also incredibly fascinating.

They would say well there's always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn't true in all cultures. It doesn't have to be true. And the first step is imaging.

Washington is awash in post-war testosterone.

I think the level of casualties is secondary... [A]ll the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war... What we hate is not casualties but losing.

The spirit of militarism has already permeated all walks of life. Indeed, I am convinced that militarism is a greater danger here than anywhere else, because of the many bribes capitalism holds out to those whom it wishes to destroy.

The prevailing move in American society to a permanent war status does more than promote a set of unifying symbols that embrace a survival of the fittest ethic, promoting conformity over dissent, the strong over the weak, and fear over responsibility, it also gives rise to what David Graeber has called a "language of command" in which violence becomes the most important element of power and mediating force in shaping social relationships.

I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.

The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.