Billy Connolly Quotes

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.

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

Political rivals attacked me. I was savagely beaten. I was kicked in the face and I lost my eye as a result.

People like to talk about war.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

I remember once I had lunch with George W Bush, his father, and Condoleezza Rice. Then I went home to find my dog and my neighbour's dog fighting over a dead rabbit, and I had to separate them. I like that my home life keeps things real.

I was born in a blender.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

I don't want to constantly be writing about terrorism and strife.

I wasn't a hero. I just got shot.

The most shocking thing about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual human beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Doesn't it strike you as queer that I, who couldn't cut the head off a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me.

They are shooting at people for reasons they don’t remember.

Bombing, particularly from the perspective of the receiving end, is not 'communication.' Bombs result in death and destruction.

I grew up knowing only war, so for me, it was the way things were. It wasn't pleasant by any means.

I was forced to be political because I had bombs falling on me as a child in Tehran.

People always assume I was in a motorcycle wreck. My response to them: no, Taliban.

War is far worse. At least where politics is going on, there are usually nice hors d’oeuvres.

Ben Battle was a soldier bold, and used to war's alarms, But a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.

The president of the University said that night, congratulations to you the students, you've won a great victory, now the war will end. And I'm certain that he believed it that night and I believed it and we went away happy. Four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Two months after that, Kennedy was assassinated. Two months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in at Harvard with a plan to expand the war.