Karl Marlantes Quotes

Politicians start wars, but it's young men who wash themselves with blood because of the politicians' shortsightedness.

Whenever I look at pictures of horrific things that soldiers do or that have been done to soldiers I always feel sorry for everybody involved because politics throws them into these horrific situations where really it's just 18-year-old kids.

All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and who therefore conscript the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.

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.

A nation's youths shouldn't be sent off to die.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

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.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

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.

It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.

I hope my own children never have to fight a war.

The services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, but in peace are only fit for fools.

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

One of the reasons it's important for me to write about war is I really think that the concept of war, the specifics of war, the nature of war, the ethical ambiguities of war, are introduced too late to children. I think they can hear them, understand them, know about them, at a much younger age without being scared to death by the stories.

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

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

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

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

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

Emotions run high in war and we put a lot of people in prison who did no more than you or I.

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

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.