Ambrose Bierce Quotes

When a soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as purple.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

A ball had passed between my body and the right arm which supported him, cutting through the sleeve and passing through his chest from shoulder to shoulder. There was no more to be done for him and I left him to his rest. I have never mended that hole in my sleeve.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

War is about dead people.

In nuclear war all men are cremated equal.

You are fit for something better than ... cannon fodder.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

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.

When death captures me," the boy vowed, "he will feel my fist in his face." (31.26)

Come, Friend, you too must die. Why moan about it so? Even Patroclus died, a far, far better man than you. And look, you see how handsome and powerful I am? The son of a great man, the mother who gave me life-- A deathless goddess. But even for me, I tell you, Death and the strong force of fate are waiting. There will come a dawn or sunset or high noon When a man will take my life in battle too-- flinging a spear perhaps Or whipping a deadly arrow off his bow.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

Dying in a a war never stopped wars from happening.

Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin' shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.

Men grow old quickly on the battlefield.

Blue is the smoke of wrar, white the bones of men.

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

We'll be chopped up before you can say 'King Maggot'.

When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.

Kill the body and the head will die.

If anything in this life is certain...if history has taught us anything, it's that you cn kill anyone.

To die in the act of killing is, in essence, to die defeated.