Spike Milligan Quotes

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

Men died as she watched, and they didn't care about what they had fought for.

Well, you know, I was through the whole of the Second World War and saw all my friends killed.

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.

Blood and death. That moves me.

You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

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.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

War taught me that not everything is glamorous.

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.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

It's always the old to lead us to the war It's always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the sabre and the gun Tell me is it worth it all.

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

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

The real heroes of WWII never came home.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

Nothing is bigger than life. There's nothing noble in death. What's noble about never seeing the sunshine again? What's noble about having your legs and arms blown off? What's noble about being an idiot? What's noble about being blind and deaf and dumb? What's noble about being dead?

History is littered with dead good men

Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke.

When the old men fight, the young people die.