Richard K. Morgan Quotes

I have to send people out to get killed.

We send them the instruments [arms] and they pull the trigger.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death.

We will not forgive you for making us kill your sons.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Arms on armour clashing bray'd Horrible discord, and the madding wheels Of brazen chariots rag'd: dire was the noise Of conflict.

Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.

Here, therefore, huge and mighty warrior though you be, here shall you die.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

War is death's feast.

War is murder writ large.

A Bayonet's contrition is nothing to the dead.

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

the function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, And poppy, or charms, can make us sleep as well, And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?

Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we'll be so melted together and entwined they won't be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

With respect to duels, indeed, I have my own ideas. Few things in this so surprising world strike me with more surprise. Two little visual spectra of men, hovering with insecure enough cohesion in the midst of the unfathomable, and to dissolve therein, at any rate, very soon, make pause at the distance of twelve paces asunder; whirl around, and simultaneously by the cunningest mechanism, explode one another into dissolution; and, offhand, become air, and non-extant--the little spitfires!

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!