Zainab Salbi Quotes

I've become very, very liberal as far as war is concerned. It's just too terrible. I've been to wars and I've seen what happens. I know what it is to be hurt, and it's nothing compared to these guys. To be blind for the rest of your life. To have prosthetic limbs.

It is not only the living who are killed in war.

War drags human beings from their tasks of building and improving, and pushes them en masse into the category of destroyers and killers.

War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder.

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

To be sure, those who are actually engaged in combat - those who actually see the maimed bodies and mourning mothers - struggle more than the rest of us to make sense of the reality of war.

I don't think any war is worth having our soldiers killed.

If Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush had ever been in combat themselves, they might not have sent troops to Iraq.

You have a lot of support right now, but once you get a lot of casualties, this thing is going to change.

Even when you win a war, you cannot forget that you have lost a generation.

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

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.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

I think that the firepower of the Civil War, the numbers of bodies that were left to rot, the numbers of amputations in the Civil War, all of this created threats to the understanding of the human being as an integral soul, as a body and soul that could be united.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don't regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn't save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I'm not naive, and I don't romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

One of the lessons learned during the Vietnam War was that the depiction of wounded soldiers, of coffins stacked higher than their living guards, had a negative effect on the viewing public. The military in Iraq specifically banned the photographing of wounded soldiers and coffins, thus sanitizing this terrible and bloody conflict.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

My theory is that Kurt had a lot of residual pain from his childhood. And when you pile that on top of his experience in World War II - he was in Dresden when it was bombed and saw a city annihilated. When you combine those two things, my impression of Kurt Vonnegut at 84 was that he was a very pained and haunted man.

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

Going to war is a rare experience in American culture, so it's easy for simple notions to gain a lot of weight. The reality is always more complex.

I don't think so, but it's always in the back of my mind that many of the soldiers being wounded and killed in Iraq are about the same age as my kids. My godson is going over soon, so the war's about to get personal for me.