Cesare Pavese Quotes

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

I'm interested in wartime stories, as I think it's important to remember what the soldiers went through.

I remember saying that wars must not be glorified, but wars must be remembered.

Death created the modern American union, not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

After the Second World War, people in Japan no longer died for their country, and even that expression was no longer used.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

I had two family members involved in World War I: two great-uncles. One of them is on a memorial in France. And the other was a trench runner who survived the war. The average life span of a trench runner was 36 hours, but he survived the whole war.

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

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

We don't really see a lot of war movies about the people that are left behind, dealing with the deaths of those who serve and the sacrifices they make.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

They fought together as brothers in arms; they died together and now they sleep side by side. To them we have a solemn obligation.

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

Throughout America today, we honor the dead of our wars. We recall their valor and their sacrifices. We remember they gave their lives so that others might live.

Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.

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.

What if I had been born during a war and I lived in an occupied city, and people were being taken out and shot every day? Everything would be different - even after the war ended, my future would be very different. Look at what these poor people in Aleppo are going through. The children, the ones who survive, are going to be absolutely altered by what they live through, and you and I, luckily, have never had to deal with that.

This is one of the consequences of the civil war. People stop trusting each other, and every stranger becomes an enemy.

Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturning brave.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.