Casualties of War Quotes

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

Let's contemplate this, how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world. One-third could be lost; or, a little more, it could be half... I say that, taking the extreme situation, half dies, half lives, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.

We had won many pacific islands where the Japanese fought to the death rather than surrender …. We had killed 100,000 people in Tokyo in a single night. It destroyed the city but as far as we could tell it had no effect on their morale. We had to shock the Japanese into surrender.

Having found the bomb we used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of thousands of young Americans.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Robert E. Lee was responsible for the deaths of more American soldiers than Hitler and Tojo.

In the next war the survivors will envy the dead.

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

It’s very easy to advocate going to war if you’re not one of the people who is going.

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

During World War II, the pilot losses were staggering. In some bombing raids, as many as 80% of the planes that left did not return.

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. That's almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.

War is not cheap, but it's the human cost that's the highest.

Why are American boys dying in a war the President refuses to call a war, yet commits our forces to it?

A handful of men, inured to war, proceed to certain victory, while on the contrary, numerous armies of raw and undisciplined troops are but multitudes of men dragged to the slaughter.

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

Advocating war is easier when you and your family are not endangered by it.

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough

In any war, people will pay the price.

I was involved with the landmines before the Princess of Wales, and nobody gave a damn about people losing their limbs. It only became a success when she came along.

When we go to war we always make some wrong assumptions. The most common is that the war will be short.

Two great and terrible truths of war are these: War is easy to enter into, but difficult to end. And ultimately, in war there are no winners.

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.

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.