Allan Massie Quotes

Men go to war for fear, honor or interest.

When Nature gives a young man no other utilizable faculty, she must be understood as intending him for a soldier.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.

In times of war, it is often best to look to our history to see how past generations of Americans dealt with the loss of their countrymen in just causes.

Although the war in which you fought took place more than half-a-century ago, your courage, your sacrifice and your patriotism reaches through the decades and inspires us today.

This year's Veterans Day celebration is especially significant as our country remains committed to fighting the War on Terror and as brave men and women are heroically defending our homeland.

Battle is the soldier's vital breath! Peace turns him into a stooping asthmatic. War makes him a whole man again, and gives him the heart, strength, and vigor of a hero.

I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.

When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

Everything starts and finishes with the soldier.

Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

None of the Americans I spoke to want to nominate their sons for the Unknown Soldier.

Blessed is that country whose soldiers fight for it and are willing to give the best they have, the best that any man has, their own lives, to preserve it, because they love it. Such an army the United States has always commanded in every crisis of its history.

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.

The victories of peace are great but the victories of war are greater. No merchant, no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men..

War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy, and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

That is why every military officer fights - so that there may be peace.

Surely no issue unites us more than our appreciation for our military personnel who are bringing aid to devastated countries, defending us against terrorism, and fighting to make a free election possible in Iraq.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

I'm not sure Americans are hesitant to do this again - to fight another war, because it looked to them like a courageous and terrific endeavor.

Like the American soldiers who went before them, they are putting their lives on the line to protect ours.