Tim O'Brien Quotes

I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified as the same, and that's the classification that we dealt with over there, just as the enemy. I felt then and I still do that I acted as I was directed, and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so.

Wars and revolutions cannot be prescribed and the circle of their influence determined in advance.

Images of dead children are so excruciating that we are now well trained to short-circuit our emotional responses to move from horror to suspicion to indifference.

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

During war, the laws are silent.

War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

History will show that perhaps we did not think through the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. But here we are.

We talk about war in America, we talk about it on an intellectual level. We don’t talk about the sound or smells of war…the pain

You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.

I lament that two or three women and children were killed by accident.

An operation that kills 5 insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of 50 more.

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.

War isn't civilized. War is failure. It's the ultimate result of a breakdown in public policy, and soldiers are the machines that handle that breakdown. In warfare, you're taught to do whatever you have to, to stay alive.

We were sowing the seeds of our own failure by this growing rage. We have no idea how Afghans resented that.

War … inevitably hurts the innocent …. Deliberate targeting of civilians may be prevented, but the nature of real war is that accidental collateral damage is a regular cost of doing business. Accidental death and destruction can be reduced by improved technology or restraints on strategy, but it cannot yet be eliminated in any war of consequences.

… war by its nature entails terrible injustice to many individuals and that acceptance of that injustice as the lesser evil is implicit in any decision to send the military into combat.

In war there are no easy choices.

It’s hard to know whether drone strikes have provoked more anger than other forms of Western power.

Wars once begun drag on in perpetuity.

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we force them.

The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man swallows arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.