J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility: But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger.

I will burn your city, your land, your self.

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

Young people are so brave when they go to fight.

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.

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

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

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

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

War... some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from.

Nothing like war reveals man in the same strength—their courage, their stupidity, their fears, their hopes, their ugliness ….

Young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which ... develops patriotism and courage. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul.

There are only two ways to come back from the battlefield: With the head of an enemy or without your own.

We are conditioned to regard warfare as something exciting and even glamorous.

Could anything be more magnificent. Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.

Everywhere the Bulgarians have passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

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.