Collateral Damage Quotes

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.

Any life lost in war is the life of a human being irrespective of whether it is an Arab of an Israeli.

You need to put drones under control; you need to lay out certain rules of engagement in order to prevent or minimize collateral casualties. It is extremely important.

The question of whether we should drop this new bomb on Japan involves such imponderable considerations as to remove it from the field of a military decision.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

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

If Muslims commit acts of terror, it is because their countries are weak and incapable of fighting back, of waging formal wars on their enemies. And so terrorism by Muslims is more common than by others. If there are Muslim countries as powerful as their enemies, they would be bombing and rocketing regardless of what is now referred to as collateral damage.

Terrorists bombard complete cities, such as Fallujah, Baghdad, innocent women and children.

When adults wage war, children perish.

When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.

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

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

War … inevitably hurts the innocent …. Deliberate targeting of civilians may be prevented, but the nature of real war is that accidental collateral damage is a regular cost of doing business. Accidental death and destruction can be reduced by improved technology or restraints on strategy, but it cannot yet be eliminated in any war of consequences.

Smart weapons periodically go stupid, through technical faults, jamming or spoofing….

The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.

This is a time for action — not for war, but for mobilization of every bit of peace machinery. It is also a time for facing the fact that you cannot use a weapon, even though it is the weapon that gives you greater strength than other nations, if it is so destructive that it practically wipes out large areas of land and great numbers of innocent people.

A lot of my friends are gangsters. Not like gangsters - well, yeah, all sorts of levels of criminality - but not the types that are preying on innocent people. I have no interest in the type of criminality that has no respect for collateral damage.

The people who died in the Twin Towers in that terrible crime mattered. The people who were bombed to death in dusty villages in Afghanistan didn't matter, even though it now seems that their numbers were greater. The people who will die in Iraq don't matter.

it is better to mistakenly kill an innocent person then to mistakenly spare an enemy.

If we accept the notion that terrorists will have immunity because as they fire on civilians they hide behind civilians, then this tactic will be legitimized and the terrorists will have their greatest victory.