Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

When you go to war, it’s very important to kill the right people

In war, as it is waged now, with the enormous losses on both sides, both sides will lose. It is a form of mutual suicide.

The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.

If civilians are going to be killed, I would rather have them be their civilians than our civilians.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

No one can hide from the immense human costs of the decisions made by generals and politicians.

Every German woman and child killed is a contribution to the future safety and happiness of Europe.

The fool is his own enemy. Seeking wealth, he destroys himself. Seek rather the other shore.

In a country like Iraq with its culture of blood feuds - is that the more locals are killed, the more motivation there is for the insurgency, for the insurgents the more feelings of revenge there are, and in the end the more the operational security of the soldiers suffers, because any soldier who kills an infant today is grooming the killer of his mate tomorrow.

Great way to fight a war - be prepared to defend yourself for winning.

The American people and the American military will never get used to civilian casualties. And we will - we will fight against that every way we can possibly bring our intelligence and our tactics to bear. We're not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys.

Yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.

What the country needs is the annihilation of the enemy.

A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.

That's generally true of people who drop bombs from high altitudes. You don't know what's going on below. You don't see the human consequences of what you're doing.

A man that is a friend to everyone is an enemy to himself.

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

Because when you kill 300 people, 400 people, who have nothing to do with the provocations Hezbollah staged, but you do it in effect deliberately by being indifferent to the scale of collateral damage, you're killing hostages in the hope of intimidating those that you want to intimidate. And more likely than not you will not intimidate them. You'll simply outrage them and make them into permanent enemies with the number of such enemies increasing.

It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country," he read. "This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.

In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

No world is without sacrifices. But if we produce casualties, we would also sustain casualties of our own.

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn't work out well last time. Let's not make that mistake again.

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.