Bret Harte Quotes

'Tis the soldier's life to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.

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.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

To be a soldier one needs that special gene, that extra something, that enables a person to jump into one on one combat, something, after all, that is unimaginable to most of us, as we are simply not brave enough.

In 1967, I signed up for the Army, where I earned an equivalency diploma, then went on to join the Special Forces. That was really was the turning point in my life. I became more disciplined and focused. I went overseas and was in combat, got wounded a couple of times, lost a lot of good friends but matured a great deal.

I fought in Korea, front line. I knew who the enemy were. The enemy were the people who were firing at me. And shooting at me.

I told the stories of the soldiers who don’t get a vote on whether or not they are on the battlefield.

You are fit for something better than ... cannon fodder.

My job is fighting.

Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.

Soldier, rest! Thy warfare o'er.

I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.

Men grow old quickly on the battlefield.

This is a war universe. War all the time. There may be other universes, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It's a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.

This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.

All of us who served in one war or another know very well that all wars are the glory and the agony of the young.

I know that nobody who hasn't been in battle or under attack can know what war is. But even in terms of being safe at home, it's also true that many Americans who think they know what being at war is, don't. Including, of course, George W. Bush and his people. They don't have a clue.

There is one hell of a difference between fighting in the ring and going to war in Vietnam.

For the helmsman is recognized in the tempest; in the warfare the soldier is proved.

This is war: Boys flung into a breach Like shoveled earth; And old men, Broken, Driving rapidly before crowds of people In a glitter of silly decorations. Behind the boys And the old men, Life weeps, And shreds her garments To the blowing winds.

If you talk to these young men and women who are fighting, they'll tell you that they think it's a worthwhile cause, and they're fighting for freedom, and they-well, they-all I'm saying-the overwhelming majority of them do.

War is to man what maternity is to a woman

Sometimes the best virtue learned on the battlefield is modesty.