Stephen Spender 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 does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

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.

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

The first time I experienced war, I thought the world was ending.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

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

A hospital alone shows what war is.

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

Going to war was the only unselfish thing I have ever done for humanity.

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

The War will leave none of us as it found us.

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.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

There's nothing glamorous about war at all.

War paralyzes your courage and deadens the spirit of true manhood.