Siegfried Sassoon Quotes

So one important lesson of Vietnam is, the first casualty of an unwise and unjust war are the American troops called on to fight it. Their service should be honored.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valor and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war - that it is fought to be won --- has been forgotten.

Modern American war is as easy to script as a B movie.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

They say military have the so-called 'secret intelligence' - this amount of intelligence must be very secret, since I've never seen any intelligent military person, nor I have seen any sense in the bloody stupid wars.

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

George W. Bush presided over an international network of torture chambers and, with the help of a compliant Congress and press, launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

As a Korean War veteran, I know firsthand and understand the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform.

The war in Iraq will end, our troops will come home, Bush will be impeached and he will be brought to justice.

Meanwhile, our young men and women whose economic circumstances make military service a viable career choice are dying bravely in a war with no end in sight.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Tony Blair is not just the worst prime minister we've ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we've ever had. It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who've died for that little liar.

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.

The men and women on the front lines of the war on terror continue to risk their lives to save ours - and for that we owe them a debt that we can never truly repay. Thanks to their efforts we have made tremendous progress. Yet, the job is not done.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.