W. H. Auden Quotes

The generals were fighting machine guns with the breasts of gallant men.

War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he must not be.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

There was a time when I thought I was doing a good thing with good guys for a good cause. Looking back, I think I really wanted to be a warrior.

And the blood of brave men was shed like unto the shedding of rain from a black cloud.

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

I think it is rather heroic to go into a war zone where everyone is trying to kill you, and you have no way of shooting back.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

Nothing like war reveals man in the same strength—their courage, their stupidity, their fears, their hopes, their ugliness ….

How beautiful it is to make my bomb shrapnel kill the enemy. How beautiful it is to kill and be killed.

Young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which ... develops patriotism and courage. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul.

Could anything be more magnificent. Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.

We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers..

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

'American Sniper' is a movie. War is a grim reality and with us still.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

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

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

Young people are so brave when they go to fight.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.