Rachel Tucker Quotes

I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

In the Middle East, the opposition is quite different than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killings.

Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.

We're not going to spread democracy at the business end of a M16 held by a 23 year old Marine.

We often fight wars with our young.

It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.

They will try to enter Baghdad, and I think this is where their graveyard will be.

War has become a mode of sovereignty and rule, eroding the distinction between war and peace.

In Defense of the World Order . . . U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor difference between shooting a dog and shooting a man.

To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

Oh, go in anywhere Colonel, go in anywhere. You'll find lovely fighting all along the line.

Being an occupier is not good for anybody's global standing. It is a catalyst for terrorist recruitment.

Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.

Northern Ireland still suffers from its past, and it will take generations to escape sectarianism and for violence to end totally. Nonetheless, it is in a different place now than during the Troubles, and it will not go back to the old days.

Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

The actions of the terrorist organizations, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas, in Gaza, against Israel are unconscionable. Instead of working towards peace, these terrorist organizations have chosen to perpetuate the violence.

The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.

Washington has thrown their soldiers on the fire.