John McCain Quotes

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

To step on a bomb, have your legs blown off and survive, is lucky. Everybody has a good-luck story. Mine was the fact that the senior medic was on patrol that day. Those who don't have a good-luck story are the ones who don't make it.

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.

Everyone always told me that I had the symptoms of a P.O.W.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

I was given several types of torture… I was given what they called the ‘water cure’…I felt…like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

Three days doesn't sound like a very long time, and under normal, everyday circumstances, it's not - but under POW camp conditions, it doesn't take long to wear down a man's sanity.

My father made many narrow escapes during his time in Vietnam.

Peeta and I had adjoining cells in the capitol. We're very familiar with each other's screams.

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.

There was a point that I stopped crying. It's not just because I didn't feel pain anymore, not because I didn't feel sorrow. It was just to keep going. I mean, it just was to survive, to live.

There are some similarities, of course (between Iraq and Vietnam). Death is terrible.

Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?

No soldier ever really survives a war.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

People say, That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. But they are wrong. What doesn't kill you doesn't kill you. That's all you get. Sometimes, you just have to hope that's enough.

We had to survive to remember. Otherwise everything we were would disappear. Those people we loved would fade as though we'd never loved them, as if they'd never walked and talked and burned, forgetting them was the real evil. That was the hole of darkness.

I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Cursing themselves in ragged dreamsfire has singed the edges of,they know a slow dying the fields have come to terms with.Shimmering fans work against the heat& smell of gunpowder, making moneyfloat from hand to hand. The next momenta rocket pushes a white fistthrough night sky, & they scatter like birds& fall into the shape their liveshave become.