George Smathers Quotes

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

War is hell.

War is a perversion of sex.

History is a bath of blood.

Violence is a holy and historically progressive force.

There are worse things than war.

I don't want, under any circumstances, to see in 'Haaretz' a picture of a woman with a baby in her arms crying while policemen deport her.

In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields.

There's enough dismemberment going on in the world without writing music about it.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.

But what a cruel thing is war to separate and destroy families and friends.

There is nothing worse than war in the summetime.

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.

What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.

War dehumanizes everyone.

When we got down from the ambulances there were sharp cracks about us as bursts of shrapnel splashed down upon the Town Hall square. Dead soldiers lay outside and I glanced at them coldly. We were in search of the living.

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

I woke up and all I could see was Iraqis standing all around me, looking down upon me. I knew at that moment something terrible had happened and I wasn't in the right place.

When I tell stories about Iraq, the ones people react to are always the stories of violence. This is strange for me.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.