Robert Graves Quotes

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

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.

It's an odd feeling, knowing someone is trying to kill you. On the front line, you learn quickly that if you're in the path of a bullet, you will get hit.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.

As a combat medic, I heard a lot of last words; I saw a lot of last breaths taken.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

Ben Battle was a soldier bold, and used to war's alarms, But a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.

Death, whether it regards ourselves or others, appears less terrible in war than at home. The cries of women and children, friends in anguish, a dark room, dim tapers, priests and physicians, are what affect us the most on the death-bed. Behold us already more than half dead and buried.

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

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.

A ball had passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through the sleeve and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.