Karl Marlantes Quotes

A state always calls itself fatherland when it is ready for murder.

We were taught to kill the enemy. They were evil. We were doing something good.

I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.

Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

This is the first war we fought in terms of our values, not for our interests.

Daily Herald this morning described burning Berlin on Saturday night as having looked “like an oven”. I wonder who really gets the satisfaction out of this terrible deterioration in human values.

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench, up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by my compulsory military service.

We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now at least he will know what he is fighting against.

We are conditioned to regard warfare as something exciting and even glamorous.

In time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.

...the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.

I love battles. I think it's part of the Irish in me.

I like to fight in America.

I didn't see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.

At war a Russian man puts on a white shirt. He may live in sin, but he dies like a saint.

If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful.

I just don't identify myself with a place. I just don't get it. Like, why am I cheering for this town? Towns are good and bad but they don't have principles, constitutions. You wouldn't go to war for your town.

Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses All bent upon killing, because their "of courses" Are not quite the same.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

Through all history, from the beginning, a noble army of martyrs have fought fiercely and fallen bravely for that unseen mistress, their country. So, through all history, to the end, as long as men believe in God that army must still march and fall, recruited only from the flower of mankind, cheered only by their own hope of humanity, strong only in the confidence of their cause.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

Do not count the days, do not count the miles. Count only the Germans you have killed. Kill the German - this is your old mother's prayer. Kill the German - this is what your children beseech you to do. Kill the German - this is the cry of your Russian earth. Do not waver. Do not let up. Kill.