War Destruction Quotes

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?

We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war. It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.

There's no nobility with war. It's tear-'em-up destruction that leaves you frustrated, bitter and angry... If you really knew what it was like for an hour, you wouldn't want anyone to go through it.

The news today about 'Atomic bombs' is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope 'this will ensure peace'. But one good thing may arise out of it, I suppose, if the write-ups are not overheated: Japan ought to cave in.

To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.

The ground was strewn with the dead, the dying, and the wounded—here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in his head, another with an arm shot off, and hundreds wounded in nearly all the various parts of the body.

Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.

It doesn't take much insight to realize that wars have been getting worse every time - worse from the point of view of the civilian, more and more destructive, more and more total.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

I am struck by how casually we as a nation react to the carnage in Iraq.

Cochinchina [Vietnam] is burning, the French and the British are being destroyed there and we are forced to get out of Southeast Asia.

The only reason to treat nuclear power differently from all the other developments in the field of physics is its staggering possibilities as a means of political pressure in peace and sudden destruction in war.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

If you ever see a war," she says, not looking up from her clipboard, "you'll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Military men are the scourges of the earth.

Science has produced such powerful weapons that in a war between great powers there would be neither victor nor vanquished. Both would be overwhelmed in destruction.

There is no doubt that Hitlerian Nazism will ultimately be defeated, for in the end the civilized nations will rise up to defend the liberty which the German barbarians seek to steal from mankind. However, I doubt that we will live through this carnage.

Throughout that period, Japan had made honest efforts to keep the destruction of war from spreading and, based on the belief that all nations of the world should find their places, had followed a policy designed to restore an expeditious peace between Japan and China.

Yes, peace can and must be won, to save the world from the terrible destruction of World War III.

After the near-total destruction of Dresden in the Allied fire-bombing of February 1945, few people believed that its beauty would ever return. Dresden's slow but steady comeback was thus met with great relief.

Nothing is more confused than to be ordered into a war to die or to be maimed for life without the faintest idea of what's going on.

War is a terribly destructive force, even beyond the limits of the battlefronts and the war zones. It's influence involves the whole community. It warps men's judgement, distorts the true standard of patriotism, breeds distrust and suspicion among neighbors, inflames passions, encourages violence, develops abuse of power, tyrannizes over men and women even in the purely social relations of life, and terrifies whole communities into the most abject surrender of every right which is the heritage of free government.