John Keegan Quotes

When men cease to fight — they cease to be — Men

Whether one believes in evolution, intelligent design, or Divine Creation, one thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion, ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever willingly given up its most powerful weapons.

My attitude toward men who mess around is simple: If you find 'em, kill 'em.

Either war is obsolete, or men are.

Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?

If it's natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?

When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.

War is the work of men, and being the work of men, is not inevitable.

The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, was their mutual destruction.

There'll always be wars because men love wars. Women don't, but men do.

War grows out of ordinary human nature.

Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

With men, the state of nature is not a state of peace, but war.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

Getting inside the mind of a terrorist wasn't difficult at all. Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies. We're not a particular species. Check out popular video games.

If you kill someone, it shows that you are afraid of that person.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

If you look in general at people who live in anarchy, they have quite high rates of death from either homicide or warfare or both. Anarchy is one of the main reasons for violence, and it may be the most important.

I think violence has always been popular, way before movies started being made.

Why do people want to kill and maim and pillage? We're all in it together.

Men are fighting... because they are convinced that the extermination of adversaries is the only means of promoting their own well-being.

The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you, and will always be brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow.

I do destroy men on a weekly basis. It's like a hobby. I'm like a praying mantis.

A lot of guys don't want to admit that they have a propensity for generosity and for violence.