Gary Cole Quotes

Violence has been Nicaragua's most important export to the world.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

Advocating war is easier when you and your family are not endangered by it.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.

I've become very, very liberal as far as war is concerned. It's just too terrible. I've been to wars and I've seen what happens. I know what it is to be hurt, and it's nothing compared to these guys. To be blind for the rest of your life. To have prosthetic limbs.

I think Syria is in a particularly sensitive geopolitical position in terms of the politics of the Middle East.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

When you go to war, both sides lose totally.

War can be so impersonal yet when we put a name, a face, a place and match it to families, then war is not impersonal.

To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.

War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

First of all, war is a very, very difficult thing to deal with, even on the good days.

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.

We talk about war in America, we talk about it on an intellectual level. We don’t talk about the sound or smells of war…the pain

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

Civil wars tend to spread to neighboring countries. That’s what history shows.

War always produces a higher standard of wages.

War isn't civilized. War is failure. It's the ultimate result of a breakdown in public policy, and soldiers are the machines that handle that breakdown. In warfare, you're taught to do whatever you have to, to stay alive.

On whatever side we regard the history of Europe, we shall perceive it to be a tissue of crimes, follies, and misfortunes, of politics without design, and wars without consequence.

In real life, it's war, and war's not entertainment. War is 'old men lying and young men dying' kind of deal. That's a saying; I didn't make that up.

We've had to pull out of so many countries in Northern Africa.