James Branch Cabell Quotes

Wars always bring about a conservative reaction. They overwhelm and destroy patient and careful efforts to improve the condition of man.

Anyway, there were more after the war than before.

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

The problem after a war is the victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence will pay. Who will now teach him a lesson?

Before the Second World War, I believed in the perfectability of social man; that a correct structure of society produced goodwill; and that, therefore, you could remove all social ills by a reorganisation of society. It is possible that I believe something of the same again; but after the war, I did not because I was unable to.

Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.

War is not won by victory.

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

War is cruel to the people, and terrible to the conquered.

A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing."

The likely economic effects [of the war in Iraq] would be relatively small... Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stop trusting each other, and every stranger becomes an enemy.