Sam Shepard Quotes

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

"Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice." ... They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse toward sadism and brutality... Not merely did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around somebody's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

Every time I kill someone, he can't plant an I.E.D. You don't think twice about it.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

It's a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It's just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one's really listening.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

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.

Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?

I have never been in a war before, but I have seen famine and death. I was asking (myself) what do they feel when they do this? I don't understand it. They are all children of God. Why do they do it. I don't understand.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

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

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry...I say to myself every day. What is going on while we sit here, while we go away to dinner or home to bed? Nearly, 1000 - Englishmen, Britishers, and the other is America...Everything else is swept away.

Before the war it had seemed incredible that such terrors and slaughters, even if they began, could last more than a few months. After the first two years it was difficult to believe that they would ever end.

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

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

That's one of the horrors of war, that you can train a person, train them to hate, train them to kill. It's a terrible thought.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men.

That's the ultimate pornography. There's nothing more pornographic than glorifying war.

You have no sense of what war is like. You have no idea what it means to see those you love fall. You cannot possibly understand what it is to fight for what you believe, and how sometimes you have to fight with words and dreams after all the weapons have been put away. You serve a cold god, surviving on his power for thousands of years without ever living!

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

I've not lived one single day of peace in Colombia, and 90 percent of people here say the same thing. We have gotten used to living in a war - we don't even react to massacres.