Joe Abercrombie Quotes

When you start off with them being the bad guys and you being the good guys, once you've made that one decision, you don't have to think anymore, if you're in the military. From that point on, anything goes. From that point on, you're capable of anything, even atrocities. Because you've made a decision a long time ago that you're on the right side. You don't keep questioning, questioning, questioning

I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

It's just as evil to kill Vietnamese as it is to kill Americans.

Legal issues aside, the American people and government should never abide the use of torture by our military or intelligence agencies. A decent society never accepts or justifies torture. It dehumanizes both torturer and victim, yet seldom produces reliable intelligence. Torture by rogue American troops or agents puts all Americans at risk, especially our rank-and-file soldiers stationed in dozens of dangerous places around the globe. God forbid terrorists take American soldiers or travelers hostage and torture them as some kind of sick retaliation for Abu Gharib.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were there not innocent civilians there? We are simply taking the rules of engagement that you have invented and turning them back against you.

It is one thing to go into combat, but quite another to go in with the sapping knowledge that what you do in the next few chaotic minutes or hours in the name of your mates, your regiment, your country, might also see you dragged into court.

If a man has his throat cut in Paris, it's a murder. If 50,000 people are murdered in the east, it is a question.

If something is right (or wrong) for us, it’s right (or wrong) for others. It follows that if it’s wrong for Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and a long list of others to bomb Washington and New York, then it’s wrong for Rumsfeld to bomb Afghanistan (on much flimsier pretexts), and he should be brought before war crimes trials.

Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?

There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire.

the Mayor of the city [John T. Monroe], during my absence, suppressed the Convention by the use of their police force, and in so doing attacked the members of the Convention and a party of two hundred negroes, and with fire-arms, clubs, and knives, in a manner so unnecessary and atrocious as to compel me to say that it was murder. About forty whites and blacks were thus killed, and about one hundred and sixty wounded. Everything is now quiet, but I deem it best to maintain a military supremacy in the city for a few days until the affair is fully investigated, IT WAS NOT RIOT. IT WAS AN ABSOLUTE MASSACRE BY THE POLICE, WHICH WAS NOT EXCELLED IN MURDEROUS CRUELTY BY THAT OF FORT PILLOW. IT WAS A MURDER WHICH THE MAYOR AND POLICE OF THE CITY PERPETRATED WITHOUT THE SHADOW OF NECESSITY.

I personally strung up thirty-five Filipinos without trial, so what was all the fuss over Waller's 'dispatching' a few 'treacherous savages'? If there had been more Smiths and Wallers, the war would have been over long ago. Impromptu domestic hanging might also hasten the end of the war. For starters, all Americans who had recently petitioned Congress to sue for peace in the Philippines should be dragged out of their homes and lynched

Who so ever kills a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind, and who so ever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind

May no young man ever be faced with the choice between violating his conscience by cooperating in competitive mass slaughter or separating himself from those who, endeavoring to save liberty, democracy, humanity, can find no better way to conscript young men to kill.

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

Everywhere the Bulgarians have passed, one sees only blood, dishonor and ruin. It is a refinement of cruelty which the imagination refuses to comprehend.

Unauthorized misdeeds are committed by every army in every war, but in this case the German hierarchy formally endorsed the legitimacy of its soldier’s conduct..

For the most part, I think American armies are awfully good in the business of protecting civilians, of not going over the line.

War justifies everything.

Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man ... , keep alive for yourselves.

Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.

A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody.

No place indeed should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.