Eugenio Montale Quotes

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

War is never cheap or easy.

We have sacrificed a hundred thousand soldiers and a hundred million of money for nothing.

The cost of war is constantly spread before me written in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones.

In every war, innocent people die.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

No one thinks of how much blood it costs.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

We’ve got to accept that we’re going to lose people in this deal. How many, I don’t know. Could be a lot.

I have been through one war. I have seen the dead piled up and I do not want to see another.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

What we pay for with our lives never costs too much.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

Blood and death. That moves me.

But do you know, I shall not be sorry to die. I shall be glad, Monsieur. And why glad, you ask? Because I love France and hate the Germans who have put this war on us.

Who has suffered? The families of the dead, no doubt. But a greater loss was inflicted on Pakistan because, as I said, we lost the pillars of our society.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

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.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

War is about dead people.