Richard K. Morgan Quotes

It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly.

Mark! Where his carnage and his conquests cease, He makes a solitude and calls it-peace!

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Two great and terrible truths of war are these: War is easy to enter into, but difficult to end. And ultimately, in war there are no winners.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulations, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

Americans have learned that it is harder to end wars than it is to begin them

Battles are never the end of war; for the dead must be buried and the cost of the conflict must be paid.

No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appall you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

Wars almost never end the way starters had in mind.

War is just like bush-clearing-the moment you stop, the jungle comes back even thicker, but for a little while you can plant and grow a crop in the ground you have won at such a terrible cost.

Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

It is always easy enough to take up arms, but very difficult to lay them down; the commencement and the termination of war are notnecessarily in the same hands; even a coward may begin, but the end comes only when the victors are willing.

If in the modern world wars have unfortunately to be fought (and they do, it seems) then they must be stopped at the first possible moment, otherwise they corrupt us, they create new problems and make our future even more uncertain. That is more than morality; it's sense.

Sweet Jesus, war does terrible things to people.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

If things do get better in Iraq, I'm saying as someone who thinks the war was a mistake. I'm saying that is cause for us all to have a huge party. It's a big deal if things get better. Because if they don't get better, our country is going to be hurt for generations.

War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.

War is a dead end, literally. And, what is more, we simply can't afford it. Not morally, and not financially. How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.