Rex Stout Quotes

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

I have never been in a war before, but I have seen famine and death. I was asking (myself) what do they feel when they do this? I don't understand it. They are all children of God. Why do they do it. I don't understand.

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

There are scenes here and effects here that would make George S. Patton wince.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

History is a bath of blood.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

That's one of the horrors of war, that you can train a person, train them to hate, train them to kill. It's a terrible thought.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes Monsters of Men.

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

Fear cripples faster than any implement of war.

War is awful. Nothing, not the valor with which it is fought nor the nobility of the cause it serves, can glorify war. War is wretched beyond description and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality. Whatever is won in war, it is loss the veteran remembers.

The war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

War is not a petri dish to examine and analyze our emotions.