Steven Weber Quotes

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

The pinning on of stars reaches its full cynical significance when sanctified valor and bereaved families are used to lend dignity to wars stupidly fought. The courageous and their families are drawn into a circular trap. The sacrificed soldier was valorous under the orders of a commander who has rewarded his effort. The battle was therefore worth fighting. Courage made it worthwhile. The basic rule of war - that it is fought to be won --- has been forgotten.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

If truth is the first victim of war, then read on - I've got some great lies for you this month.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

The old saying that war is a racket has taken on an even more shameful meaning.

Nevertheless, the mode, the justification, and all the games involved in this war were dishonest.

Formerly, a nation that broke the peace did not trouble to try and prove to the world that it was done solely from higher motives…Now war has a bad conscience. Now every nation assures us that it is bleeding for a human cause, the fate of which hangs in the balance of its victory…No nation dares to admit the guilt of blood before the world.

Food is as important to armies as ammunition—but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.

The immediate reaction of the poets who fought in the war was cynicism... The war dramatized for them the contrast between the still-idealistic young, living and dying on the unalteringly horrible stage-set of the Western front, with the complacency of the old at home, the staff officers behind the lines. In England there was violent anti-German feeling; but for the poet-soldiers the men in the trenches on both sides seemed united in pacific feelings and hatred of those at home who had sent them out to kill each other.

In real life, it's war, and war's not entertainment. War is 'old men lying and young men dying' kind of deal. That's a saying; I didn't make that up.

We're living through a time where we are fighting wars fostered by politics, admittedly not on the same scale as the First World War, but with equally tragic realities for our soldiers and their families.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

So one important lesson of Vietnam is, the first casualty of an unwise and unjust war are the American troops called on to fight it. Their service should be honored.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

The tactic of leading people into... a war that doesn't make any sense by telling them they are under attack, and if they raise any objection they're unpatriotic, is a very old tactic. And it doesn't intimidate me.

Sending our youth to war is wrong.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

There can hardly be a more grave act imaginable than to dupe a democracy into going to war, but this is what Bush has done.

I gave my life for freedom--This I know; For those who bade me fight had told me so.

... a trick speech, calculated to lead the American people into war and ruin.