Michael Hastings Quotes

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

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.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

I've been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, 'Hey, this war is bogus,' to some guy who's 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

Horror movies started to wane around the onset of World War II, and after World War II, when all the troops came home, people weren't really interested in seeing horror movies, because they had the real horror right on their front doorsteps.

For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary - the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things.

What shall I say further? Shall I not stop short and leave to your imaginations to portray the tragic deeds of war? Is it not enough that I here leave it even to unexperience to fancy the hardships, the anxieties, the dangers, even of the best life of a soldier?

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.

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.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

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.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

Young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which ... develops patriotism and courage. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul.

The generals were fighting machine guns with the breasts of gallant men.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

Send me six hundred men who know how to die

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

'American Sniper' is a movie. War is a grim reality and with us still.

I had no desire to go to Iraq. I never wanted to go to Mosul. I'm not a war correspondent. No part of me thrives on the adrenaline or anything like that.

When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.