Paul Virilio Quotes

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

We have been traveling through a cloud; the sky has been dark ever since the war began.… We want to take good tidings home to our people, that they may sleep in peace. I want ... all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken for enemies.

The sinews of war are not gold, but good soldiers.

My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.

Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.

To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.

When was the last time the United States won a war? You know, it lost in Vietnam. It's lost in Afghanistan. It's lost in Iraq. And it will not be able to contain the situation. It is hemorrhaging. It is now - you know, of course you can continue with drone attacks, and you can continue these targeted killings, but on the ground, a situation is being created which no army - not America, not anybody - can control. And it's just, you know, a combination of such foolishness, such a lack of understanding of culture in the world.

What armies and how much of war I have seen, what thousands of marching troops, what fields of slain, what prisons, what hospitals, what ruins, what cities in ashes, what hunger and nakedness, what orphanages, what widowhood, what wrongs and what vengeance.

I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

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

When they remain in garrison, soldiers are maintained with fear and punishment; when they are then led to war, with hope and reward.

He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?

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.

Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world's problems?

It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.

Only one military organization can hold and gain ground in war-a ground army supported by tactical aviation with supply lines guarded by the navy.

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people.

Men who fight wars in winter don't live till spring.

The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed.

Whoever has an army has power and that war decides everything.

You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.

Boredom slays more of existence than war.

All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes.

We have bodies coming home and coffins covered in flags, not just in the UK but world-wide.