Some quotes for 11/11
On this 11/11, after having spent a goodly portion of the day watching Veterans' Day programming (and crying over a lot of it), some reflections on war, patriotism, and soldiers:
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
~John F. Kennedy
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
~José Narosky
It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.
~George McGovern
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official...
~Theodore Roosevelt
What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.
~Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
~Dwight D. Eisenhower
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.
~John F. Kennedy
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
~José Narosky
It doesn't require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder, and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed, it won't be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate.
~George McGovern
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Declaration of Rights"
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official...
~Theodore Roosevelt