Christian de Duve Quotes

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

When I look back on my childhood, I think of that short time in Beirut. I know that seeing the city collapse around me forced me to grasp something many people miss: the fragility of peace.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

I have come to believe there is nothing in the lives of human beings more terrifying than war and nothing more important than for those of us who have experienced it to share its awful truth

There are worse things than war.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

War makes thieves and peace hangs them.

A true war story is never moral.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

I remember people who'd had a lot of hardship during the war. They'd thought we'd won.

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.

The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.