Wallace Stevens Quotes

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

Here's to the red of it, There's not a thread of it, No, not a shred of it, In all the spread of it, From foot to head, But heroes bled for it, Faced steel and lead for it, Precious blood shed for it, Bathing in red.

You are fit for something better than ... cannon fodder.

We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers..

A soldier never dies. His blood makes the grass green for his children.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow: In Flanders fields.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

When you go to war, it's important for everybody to know that they're going to come home in one way or other.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

The brave men who died in Vietnam, more than 100% of which were black, were the ultimate sacrifice.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

Surviving is the only glory in war.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

One of the reasons it's important for me to write about war is I really think that the concept of war, the specifics of war, the nature of war, the ethical ambiguities of war, are introduced too late to children. I think they can hear them, understand them, know about them, at a much younger age without being scared to death by the stories.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

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