Ambrose Bierce Quotes

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

With bombs and fires, you get only one mistake.

The town caught fire in several places, shells crashed and burst, and solid shot rained like hail.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

But it is neither cannon nor bayonet that will do the worst damage to this city. No, this place will remember the war against our government just as long as there are inhabitants here.

Wars ruin armies.

Destroyer of Villages

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

Thorn bushes grow where armies have camped.

The brazen throat of war.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration, is one of the most terrible.

This is war: Boys flung into a breach Like shoveled earth; And old men, Broken, Driving rapidly before crowds of people In a glitter of silly decorations. Behind the boys And the old men, Life weeps, And shreds her garments To the blowing winds.

Oh say, can you see, it's really such a mess. Every inch of earth is a fighting nest. Giant pencial and lipstick tube shaped things, continue to rain and cause scream and pain, and the arctic stains from silver blue to bloody red.

Now at last the slowly gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us. Four or five millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept.

Paris must either not fall into the hands of the enemy or the enemy must find it only a wasteland.

When war begins, then hell openeth.

I think war is a dangerous place.

In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.

If we're damaged it will take 20 years to fix ourselves. It only takes one year to cause 20 years of damage.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad inreparable way.