Terry Pratchett Quotes

If you're going to write about war, which my books are about, wars are nasty things. I think it's sort of a cheap, easy way out to write a war story in which no one ultimately dies.

Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.

At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.

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.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

War is hell.

I'm not anti-war. I served in a war, and I served proudly. But just or not, necessary or not, war is the industrial-scale slaughter of other humans.

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. 'Alas, poor Yorick,' that's about death. And in 'Romeo and Juliet' everyone up ends up dying. The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and death.

War is never cheap or easy.

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

Bones inside clothes. That was war to me.

In every war, innocent people die.

war is not just a victory or loss ... People die.

What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?

It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost. In war it is extraordinary how it all comes down to the character of one man.

Living in war is a co- existence with death.

Just take a look around you: Blood is flowing in rivers and in such a jolly way you’d think it was champagne.

That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Lee saw the fireball and head through the roar in his ears Hester saying, "That's the last of 'em Lee." He said, or thought, "Those poor men didn't have to come to this, nor did we." She said, "We held 'em off. We held out. We're a-helping Lyra." Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.