George H. W. Bush Quotes

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

I lay in my bed night after night staring at the ceiling and thinking, Why have I survived the war? Why was I the last person in my immediate family to be alive? I didn’t know.

I went to war. .... I survived, while other men around me died. ... men whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else's hate, or love, or indifference.

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.

I was drafted into the Army when I was 19 and came out at age 22. Most people that I knew didn't think they'd come home alive. I didn't think I would either, so I was happy when I did.

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking - well - I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on.

The early years of my life were very, very traumatic. It was scary, because any child knew that death was sort of lurking around Europe as far as Jews were concerned.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

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.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts - we have learned only recently how close we were to war - but I knew enough to make me tremble.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

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

Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction.

Being in combat is not unending high-five moments.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

But come here, Fear. / I am alive! / And you are so afraid / of dying.

War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed and are damn glad it wasn't them.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

Living in war is a co- existence with death.