Ernest Hemingway Quotes

Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

I don't think any war is worth having our soldiers killed.

A nation's ability to fight a modern war is as good as its technological ability.

What are individuals in wars today? Expendable commodities, dead or alive.

All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

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.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

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

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

The First World War was a horror of gas, industrialised slaughter, fear, and appalling human suffering.

War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Only the man who disciplines himself strictly can stand for long the terrific pace of modern war.

The destructiveness of war waged on the scale and with the intensity which conscript armies, the new means of transportation and communication, the new artillery, the aeroplanes, the high explosives, and the continuity of the fighting on battle fronts of unexampled length, by night as well as by day, and in stormy and wintry as well as moderate weather, make possible, has proved to be beyond all power of computation, and could not have been imagined in advance. Never before has there been any approach to the vast killing and crippling of men, the destruction of all sorts of man's structures—buildings, bridges, viaducts, vessels, and docks—and the physical ruin of countless women and children.

These same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result of it on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction – it's very strange

In war, as it is waged now, with the enormous losses on both sides, both sides will lose. It is a form of mutual suicide.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war and the orators who talk so much about going on, no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case of musterd gas - the poor things burnt and blistered all over with great musterd coloured suppurating blisters, with blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, and always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying their throats are closing and they know they will choke.

I've seen firsthand the high human cost of war.