Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough

War is too strange to process alone.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

And looking into the face of ... one dead man we see two dead, the man and the life of the woman who gave him birth; the life she wrought into his life! And looking into his dead face someone asks a woman, what does a woman know about war? What, what, friends in the face of a crime like that, what does man know about war?

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

My uncle died in 1987. I unfortunately - I saw it happen before it happened, which was really, really hard because I was 16 years old and I thought, like, Well, I'm seeing this. I'm supposed to stop this. And I couldn't.

For too many families, the aftershock of the war in Afghanistan will be felt every day, most probably for the rest of their lives. I know because I've looked into the eyes and the faces of grieving mothers.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

Two great and terrible truths of war are these: War is easy to enter into, but difficult to end. And ultimately, in war there are no winners.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.

Most people are remarkably resilient. Even those who have been through war or great loss often find reservoirs of strength. But the legacy of trauma is a heavy burden to bear.

The real sorrows of war, like those of drunkenness, always fall most heavily upon women.

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Alright, let's tackle the worst part of this pandemic: people are dying, or they're worried about their loved ones dying - and it's hard not to spiral out. After almost two decades at war, this has been the reality for military families for a very long time. Welcome to our club.