Tim Harford Quotes

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

I was not an anthropology student prior to the war. I took it up as part of a personal readjustment following some bewildering experiences as an infantryman and later as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany. The science of the Study of Man has been extremely satisfactory from that personal standpoint.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

We had four years of world war which the peoples endured only because they were told that their sufferings would free humanity forever from the scourge of war.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

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

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.

The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

Every war has its demons.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

The unnecessary result of wartime hysteria.

Soldiers know what war is like. That's why so many of them turn out to be peacemakers.