Richard Francis Burton Quotes

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

Blood and death. That moves me.

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we 'know' that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

I mean, death is a serious thing, certainly not to be sneezed at.

You can't quantify human pain the way you can measure out sugar. Death comes one individual at a time.

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

Death remains about the one certain fact in the lives of each one of us, and there will be suffering, sorrow, and sadness next week as there was last week.

The loss of life will be irreplaceable.

When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

Death is a monster; death is horrible.

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

In 1874, Mary Fraser accompanied her husband Hugh to Hong Kong, arriving hours after a typhoon had wrecked the island. Some 10,000 boat families had drowned in the harbour. There was no way to avoid the bloated bodies, and when Mary disembarked, she felt her foot land on something soft.

There is no flock, however watched and tended, but one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant chair.

Death is the ultimate disappointment

You can count the dead, but you can't count the cost. We've got no math for Heaven.

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that.

The lucky ones are just born dead.

One death is a tragedy; a thousand is a statistic.

I had a twin, and he didn't make it.

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one's a celebration and the other's a dull fact.

The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.

For a culture that has such a problem with death, we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot, killed and blown up, and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But, the reality of it is that every day people die, and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.

Every civilian's death diminishes us, collectively.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.