Julia Louisa Lovejoy Quotes

The stores are already empty, as they were looted immediately…This was the first stage. As soon as it ended the second stage began: the looting of apartments…At first they used to come on the pretext of “searching for arms”…As time passed, there was no longer a need for formal pretext; they simply come and take not only gold, silver, jewelry, and precious stones, but also pillows and blankets, and often linens, clothing, furs, and even furniture ...

Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.

But it is neither cannon nor bayonet that will do the worst damage to this city. No, this place will remember the war against our government just as long as there are inhabitants here.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

The misery in war-torn Afghanistan is reminiscent of images from the Thirty Years' War.

Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.

Insurgencies are nearly as old as warfare itself.

This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.

They gathered together without any other counsel, and without any amour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. And they then went to another castle, and took the knight thereof and bound him fast to a stake, and then violated his wife and his daughter before his face and then slew the lady and his daughter and all his other children, and then slew the knight by great torment and burnt and beat down the castle. And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein. These mischievous people thus assembled without captain or amour robbed, brent and slew all gentlemen that they could lay hands on, and forced and ravished ladies and damsels, and did such shameful deeds that no human creature ought to think on any such

All the business houses, banks, stores, etc., in the city were robbed and burned save one, and... most of the businessmen killed.... Mrs. Reed put out the fire six times to save her house, and they would fire it anew, but she by almost superhuman exertions saved it.... One lady threw her arms around her husband, and begged of them to spare his life. They rested the pistol on her arm as it was around his body, and shot him dead, and the fire from the pistol burnt the sleeve of her dress….The very air seems charged with blood and death.... The fires were still glowing in the cellars... Here and there among the embers could be seen the bones of those who had perished.... The sickening odor of burned flesh was oppressive. Pandemonium itself seems to have broken loose... and death runs riot over the country….

What is war but murder and theft committed by great numbers on great numbers?

The Irish nation was possessed of the most blessed and happy conditions, before their own unskillful rage and fury brought this war upon them; and they have since had leisure enough thoroughly to consider and value the wonderful plenty, peace and security which they enjoyed till the year 1641, when they wantonly and disdainfully flung those blessings from them.

War is the most readily available form of chaos.

The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Everybody with a gun has a checkpoint in Lebanon. And in Lebanon, you'd be crazy not to have a gun. Though, I assure you, all the crazy people have guns, too.

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant.