Stephen Spender Quotes

The ground was strewn with the dead, the dying, and the wounded—here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in his head, another with an arm shot off, and hundreds wounded in nearly all the various parts of the body.

Blue is the smoke of wrar, white the bones of men.

Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.

Warre is deaths feast.

Ares ever loves to pluck all the fairest flower of an armed host.

When war begins, then hell openeth.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

Wars ruin armies.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

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

It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.

War is death's feast.

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

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

War is the science of destruction.

There are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.

I hate war... for the dictatorships it puts in the place of democracies, and for the starvation that stalks after it.

War is hell.

Do not say that someone has won and someone has lost. These are unappropriate, blasphemous words. We have all been scorched by the deadly breath of fratricide.

We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands.... Is not Life miserable enough, comes not death soon enough without resort to the hideous enginery of War? People of the U.S.! Your rulers are precipitating you into a fathomless abyss of crime and calamity! Why sleep you thoughtless on its verge, as though this was not your business?

Instead of stealing upon each other and taking every advantage to kill the enemy and save their own people, as we do, they [whites] march out, in open daylight, and fight, regardless of the number of warriors they may loose!

Generals make plans. Plans go wrong. And soldiers die.