David Hackworth Quotes

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.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.

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

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.

Sending our youth to war is wrong.

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.

War is capitalism with the gloves off …

The only way to combat the murder that is war is to show the dirty combinations that make it and the criminals and swine that hope for it and the idiotic way they run it when they get it so that an honest man will distrust it as he would distrust a racket and refuse to be enslaved into it.

Many powerful people don't want peace, because they live off war.

War what is it good for? It's good for business.

In every war, there's looting.

The world is organised by the war economy and the war culture.

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments.

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

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.

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.

Stored today in the arsenals of the most enlightened Christian nations are enough bullets to kill every man, woman and child on earth.

If women and children have cruelly and needlessly suffered, if without reason cities have been wrecked, the world should know that.

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.

The sponsors of war closely resemble the weapons they create. And smart bombs, depleted uranium, land mines, rockets and tanks, rather than protect 'widows and orphans and strangers at the gate', are designed precisely to create 'widows and orphans', to transform strangers into enemies and enemies into corpses.