Henry Rollins Quotes

I had no desire to go to Iraq. I never wanted to go to Mosul. I'm not a war correspondent. No part of me thrives on the adrenaline or anything like that.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

The war, as I felt it and a lot of my compatriots felt it, was a creative act.

When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

I know that I'm already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.

I'm glad I never went to war.

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.

If I was a soldier going to war, I'd be pretty scared the night before a battle. It's a scary thing. And I want my readers to feel that fear as they turn the page.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

You aren’t quite serious in America yet. You haven’t got the war right under your chins.

In a war, the hearts and minds of the people on the home front are just as important as the hearts and minds of those in the war zone.

Men go to war for fear, honor or interest.

My eyes are wide open... you serve in Iraq, your eyes are wide open.

I was kind of confused. I thought, Well, if I get drafted, I'll go. Everybody was very concerned with it. I had friends who went. Some that came back and some that didn't.

No two wars are ever the same. Some are just, some are unjust, but the basic commonality shared between them all is that young men and women heeded a call to service, overcame their fear, and fought for their side.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.

Pearl Harbor was the defining event in my life. It shaped who I am, and all of my hang-ups and my drives, I think, stem from that.