Paddy Chayefsky Quotes

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.

Civil wars leave nothing but tombs.

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky And the affrighted steed ran on alone, Do not weep. War is kind. Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom -A field where a thousand corpses lie. Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.

You've lived through a lot of wars, I said. "Yes." Do they ever make more sense? "No.

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.

War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

Tomorrow the war will start, There will be widows. There will be orphans. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

It is not easy to talk about peace to people who are mourning every day.

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

Slum kids die slowly, their lives eroded at so languid a pace that even they would have trouble tracing the disintegration. To the children of war death explodes like a car bomb.

War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.

War destroys, kills, impoverishes. Lord, give us your peace!

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.