War Losses Quotes

History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.

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.

In a political democracy, every soldier’s death is a public event.

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.

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968...Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops...Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces.

Someone earlier made a remark about losing 500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded in Iraq. Those soldiers were sent there by the vote of Sen. Lieberman, Sen. Edwards and Sen. Kerry. I think that is a serious matter.

We can no more condone the wastefulness of self-serving company executives than we can the sacrifice of the lives of our citizens in a senseless war.

The estimated loss of up to six million dead is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated.

How vivid is the suffering of the few when the people are few and how the suffering of nameless millions in two world wars is blurred over by numbers.

You ask me if I will not be glad when the last battle is fought, so far as the country is concerned I, of course, must wish for peace, and will be glad when the war is ended, but if I answer for myself alone, I must say that I shall regret to see the war end.

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

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.

Great nations do not succumb through lost wars, but rather through racial decay and the destruction of their internal order.

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.

Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American television, largely bloodless.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

If you look at casualties, you find countries that had much higher loss rates per capita than the US. Denmark comes to mind, the United Kingdom, they have suffered heavy losses at various points, the Germans as well.

The Prime Minister, both the other day and today, expressed himself as satisfied that the balance of advantage lay on our side. He laid great stress on the heaviness of the German losses and the lightness of ours. What did the Germans lose? A few thousand men, nothing to them, a score of transports, and part of a Navy which anyhow cannot match ours. What did they gain? They gained Norway, with the strategical advantages which, in their opinion at least, outweigh the whole of their naval losses. They have gained the whole of Scandinavia. What have we lost? To begin with, we have lost most of the Norwegian Army...

Since the end of the World War II, the United States has fought three "small" wars...we lost all three of them and for the same reason-hubris.

Politicians didn’t want to talk to their constituents about body bags that would be coming back.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

There's no service ribbon for people who fought in Korea. We lost over 30,000 men between 1951 and 1953 - as many as we lost in 15 years in Vietnam.

I don't think any war is worth having our soldiers killed.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage.