Maya Lin Quotes

In every war, innocent people die.

In any war, people will pay the price.

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

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

The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other - instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.

When I heard your organization was recording testimonies, I knew I had to come. She died in my arms, saying 'I don't want to die.' That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

I've seen firsthand the high human cost of war.

In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

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.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

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

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

I did not want my people killed. I did not want bloodshed.

My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

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

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

Do not say that someone has won and someone has lost. These are unappropriate, blasphemous words. We have all been scorched by the deadly breath of fratricide.

Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life.

Bloody Ground

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

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.