Richard Engel Quotes

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

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

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

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

War dehumanizes everyone.

War... some people glamorise war and glorify war. It's not nice, from whatever point of view you come from.

Nothing like war reveals man in the same strength—their courage, their stupidity, their fears, their hopes, their ugliness ….

Young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which ... develops patriotism and courage. But it is only fair, too, to let them know that the garments of the deity are filthy and that some of her influences debase and befoul.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.

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

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences.

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.

War is at its best barbarism.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

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.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.

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