Young Soldiers Quotes

There would never have been secession if demagogues had not swayed non-slaveholding voters and naïve young soldiers to believe that the North was filled with cowards, poltroons, and negro-worshippers.

... deployed on the sands of Saudi Arabia and facing possible extinction, are young men and women drawn, in the main, from the poorer families of our republic.

The soldiers at the DMZ are all very young, and I feel guilty about that.

For the average person, 98 percent of those who fought in the Civil War, they did not own slaves. They were simply answering the call, and in this case many, many young men - 17, 18 years old - coming in to defend what they saw as a federal invasion of Virginia, and they fought honorably.

The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.

The only reason I send a single young man or woman in uniform anywhere in the world is because I think it's necessary to keep us safe.

When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.

And so that these young men, soldiers and seamen alike, may ever fiercer be and impetuous when they do battle with the enemy, so shall they be given a barrel or two of beer.

You know — we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "'My God, my God — ' I said to myself, 'It's the Children's Crusade.

No great dependence is to be placed on the eagerness of young soldiers for action...fighting is agreeable to those who are strangers to it.

Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.

It was sad news to read of two more of our destroyers being lost. I cannot bear to think of the many women whose hearts ache for the boys and men who are lost with each of these ships; as well as any one of the airplanes that fail to come back from a raid, or that crash somewhere in this country or in foreign parts. These days are terrible ones for the men themselves and for the women who wait at home for news. So many of the boys are very young and, under ordinary circumstances, would have their whole lives still before them. I wonder if women in every country are making up their minds that out of this war there shall come some kind of permanent peace.

Of course Overlord did not fail. How could it? With some many fine young men and women from all corners of the earth all determined to do their best to free a world gone half mad.

I think our great task is to make certain that our young men and women in the military do not get sucked into never- ending, perpetual warfare within the quagmire of Syria and Iraq. And I will do my very best to make sure that that doesn't happen.

I think if people really listened to what our families who serve go through, we could have a realistic discussion of what it means to send young people to war.

It's something I take very seriously as a commander: the lives of our young men and women.

In the war, most young men were inducted into the armed forces at the age of 17. A group of students was permitted to attend university before taking part in wartime research projects.

I will never forget the moment when I was liberated by the American Army. I will never forget those very young boys coming up the hill, who had to take me a prisoner to liberate me.

It is wrong to take an 18-year-old boy or girl and arm them with machine guns and make them the almighty king of some little Arab village. No young man, and no old man either, should have so much power over the life and death of so many helpless individuals. It is corrupting. It sometimes provokes desperate, savage and indiscriminate violence among the occupied.

My attitude is that when we put a youngster in harm's way, somebody who wears our nation's uniform in harm's way, he or she deserves the absolute best.

Yes, young men, Italy owes to you an undertaking which has merited the applause of the universe. You have conquered and you will conquer still, because you are prepared for the tactics that decide the fate of battles.

If you make a film and then two and a half, three years later, suddenly the country's changed and you look like you just happened to hit it. I actually like being contrarian. I would have preferred to come out three years ago when everyone was disagreeing with me. But hopefully it asks a lot of questions about our responsibility in sending young men and women to war, especially a war that's so complex, where there's no right answer, where they're forced with impossible decisions every day.

Granted, it's a long time ago, it's in the 1940s, and, granted, it's warfare that we hopefully will not conduct in a similar fashion ever again, but it is crucially important. And that act, the storming of the Normandy beaches, coupled with the Battle of the Bulge, ending the spread of Nazism throughout Europe, saved the world and it saved the world for freedom. And it was the United States that did it. And it was a bunch of 19- and 20- and 21-year-old people who did it.

The Southern army … was simply a vast mob of rather ill-armed young gentlemen from the country.

We should understand the limitations of war. We should understand the sacrifices our young men and women go through losing lives and limbs. And they should only do it for the highest of purposes.