Rich Turner Quotes

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valor and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war - that it is fought to be won --- has been forgotten.

The unvarnished truth is that we have spent the last decade funding the machinery of war, and our children have been sacrificed.

Sending our youth to war is wrong.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The question in my mind then is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

I don't think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

Politicians didn’t want to talk to their constituents about body bags that would be coming back.

The people, ever greedy for war, till they suffer by it …

Nations have been lashed unwillingly into war by high powered propaganda carried on under the supervision of swivel chair gentlemen who keep far away from the danger point in all wars, and at the same time the people have been made the victims of the wretched individuals who have made countless millions of dollars out of, so to speak, the dead flesh of the youth of the world.

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

Generals make plans. Plans go wrong. And soldiers die.

The sad reality of war is that if you are going to be in day-to-day combat, there are going to be casualties.

It will plow under every fourth American boy.

… once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

My message was one of death for young men. How odd it is to applaud that.

We did not win the war with prayers, but with the blood of our soldiers..

In real life, it's war, and war's not entertainment. War is 'old men lying and young men dying' kind of deal. That's a saying; I didn't make that up.