John Dos Passos Quotes

The brazen throat of war.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

The lamp of war is kindled here, not to be extinguished but by torrents of blood.

War is the father and king of all.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

War." Gorgon spits the word. "That is what they call it to give the illusion of honor and law. It is chaos. Madness and blood and the hunger to win. It has always been thus and shall always be so.

No study is possible on the battlefield.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

I know of nothing more exciting than war.

A whole week, a single campaign, a month, a week, even a day was far more than enough to cut a company or platoon to ribbons or cripple a man for life: it needed only a quarter of an hour.

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

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

War makes early risers of us all.

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?

The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.

One war, such as that of our Revolution, is enough for one life.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.

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

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Arms on armour clashing bray'd Horrible discord, and the madding wheels Of brazen chariots rag'd: dire was the noise Of conflict.

We shall not enter into any of the abstruse definitions of war used by publicists. We shall keep to the element of the thing itself, to a duel. War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale.