Eddie Vedder Quotes

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

War is cruel to the people, and terrible to the conquered.

It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

War is a defeat for humanity.

You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.

War hath no fury like a noncombatant.

From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed.

Do you know Afghan children wear shoes when they sleep, so they can run easily if a bomb falls during the night? Iraq has been similarly pushed against the wall. What proof did the West ultimately have, what justification for raining bombs on them?

Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.

A war is going to destroy our economy even further. It's going to be a threefold humanitarian disaster.

War is not a computer-generated missile striking a digital map. War is the color of earth as it explodes in our faces, the sound of child pleading, the smell of smoke and fear. Women survivors of war are not the single image portrayed on the television screen, but the glue that holds families and countries together. Perhaps by understanding women, and the other side of war ... we will have more humility in our discussions of wars... perhaps it is time to listen to womens side of history.

People who are anxious to bring on war don't know what they are bargaining for; they don't see all the horrors that must accompany such an event.

Wars shatter so many lives. I think especially of children robbed of their childhood.

The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.

Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know, what did Iraq do to us?

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.

Since this war began our sympathy has gone out to all the suffering people who have been dragged into it. Further hundreds of millions have become involved since I spoke at Limerick fortnight ago.

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.

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

I am struck by how casually we as a nation react to the carnage in Iraq.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.