Amos Oz Quotes

It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.

Bush's war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.

Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.

It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime.

The attendant on William Rufus, who discharged at a deer an arrow, which glanced against a tree and killed the king, was no murderer, because he had no such design. And, on the other hand, a man who should lie in wait to assassinate another, and pull the trigger of a gun with that intent, would be morally a murderer, not the less though the gun should chance to miss fire.

Sometimes I feel like God…when I order someone killed – they die the same day.

I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise, Kings should not play at. Nations would do well To extort their truncheons from the puny hands Of heroes, whose infirm and baby minds Are gratified with mischief, and who spoil, Because men suffer it, their toy the world.

Lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?" When challenged about the expanding reach of the law, the lawyer answers, "Why not?

He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding why such things were forbidden. Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

What Hamas and the Palestinian people are doing is legitimate resistance against the Israeli occupation. Our resistance is confined to the territories inside Palestine and only targets the Israeli occupation. We are not blood-mongering killers who kill innocent people around the world.

Every combat is the bloody and destructive measuring of the strength of forces, physical and moral; whoever at the close has the greatest amount of both left is the conqueror.

Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.

I would rank George Washington as America's greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world's greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.

...that standing army can never be formidable (threatening) to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in the use of arms.

I have seen children shot in El Salvador, Algeria, Guatemala, Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

This world is twisted beyond hope, when lowborn smugglers must vouch for the honor of kings.

I think our great task is to make certain that our young men and women in the military do not get sucked into never- ending, perpetual warfare within the quagmire of Syria and Iraq. And I will do my very best to make sure that that doesn't happen.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games, maybe we'll get somewhere.

Kings play the fool, and the people suffer for it.

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "No lie will last forever." We have to work at removing lies from our own hearts. And on the national level, we do this not because we blame our country, but because we love it.

An armed man need not fight.

Ideas more than once have prevailed against naked power. Guns and aircraft alone do not make a state powerful. Unless force is backed up by the will of the great body of people it loses its meaning.

Technology is basically neutral. It's kind of like a hammer. The hammer doesn't care whether you use it to build a house, or whether a torturer uses it to crush somebody's skull.