Seamus Heaney Quotes

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

Clashes of values and the struggle for primacy constitute a constant in human history that accounts for that other constant - conflict and war.

Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.

If I look at history, it seems that most wars and most cruel things have been done by men and not by women.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

History is a bath of blood.

You give us the mission, we can get ‘em. We’ll rout ’em out. When we’re through with them, they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.

War and unrest appeal to me more than good bourgeois order. Brutality is respected, the people need wholesome fear. They want to fear someone. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

War may well be the worst way imaginable to create larger, more peaceful societies, but the depressing fact is that it is pretty much the only way.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never solves anything, I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The Ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more disputes in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace.

Many great novels have shown a world torn to shreds by the brutality of war. To do so, their authors ground their texts in the details of destruction and decay.

Though not the longest battle in history - that was Verdun - Stalingrad was certainly the most pitiless, an adjective that reappears regularly in Mr. Beevor's classic work.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

War knows no law except that of might.

Historical experience is written in blood and iron.

A broader reading of history shows that appeasement, no matter how it is labeled, never fulfills the hopes of the appeasers.

We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.

War: A wretched debasement of all the pretenses of civilization.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.