Phil Ochs Quotes

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

Wars are indeed fought by children, by young people who have little to say in where they are sent to die.

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

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulations, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

War hurts. It hurts no matter which sides the bombs are falling on.

Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.

Before we become too arrogant with the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, the sin of pride, let us remember that the two great wars of this century, wars which cost twenty million dead, were fought between Christian nations praying to the same God.

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.

It was Harry Patch, who was the last living World War I veteran; and by veteran I mean someone who actually fought in the war, he didn't just happen to be in the army at that time, in the Great War. And when the Iraq War started, he was interviewed, and they said, well what do you think of this? And he said, in a very sad voice, "Well, that's why my mates died. We thought we were going to end all that sort of thing."

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost. In war it is extraordinary how it all comes down to the character of one man.

A Pentagon official once said the people who would actually push the button probably have never seen a person die. He said the only hope -and it's a strange thought - is if they put the button to launch the nuclear war behind a man's heart. The President, then, with a rusty knife, would have to cut out the man's heart, kill the man, to get to the button.

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

I came from the South and I know what war is, for I have seen its wreckage and terrible ruin. It is easy for me as President to declare war. I do not have to fight, and neither do the gentlemen on the Hill who now clamour for it. It is some poor farmer's boy, or son of some poor widow away off in some modest community, or perhaps the scion of a great family, who will have to do the fighting.

I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, we saw people's limbs sheared off, we saw kids blown apart, for one week, war would be eradicated. Instead, what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game.

I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima - and you know, is the price worth it?

As Churchill said about the Great War, and he said this in about 1924, that it was the first war in which man realized that he could obliterate himself completely. If you consider the way the whole world was impacted, 18 million people worldwide died, and that is taking into account military and civilian deaths: 18 million people. And it was the whole world, if you will. You know, many of those trenches were dug by Chinese. There are photographs of Chinese looking like they just came from China, with their hats and so on, digging the trenches, right from the beginning.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.