destruction of war Quotes

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.”

“The war has ruined us for everything.”

“It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

“We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.”

“A hospital alone shows what war is.”

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

“The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts.”

“My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling.”

“George: Be careful, Martha…I’ll rip you to pieces. Martha: You aren’t man enough…you haven’t the guts. George: Total war? Martha: Total.”

“George: “And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and hardened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must…eventually…fall.”

“In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room.”

“Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it’s only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not on Earth.”

“In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.”

“No doubt the thought that was uppermost in a thousand of those vigilant minds, even as it was uppermost in mine, was the riddle—how much they understood of us. Did they grasp that we in our millions were organized, disciplined, working together? Or did they interpret our spurts of fire, the sudden stinging of our shells, our steady investment of their encampment, as we should the furious unanimity of onslaught in a disturbed hive of bees? Did they dream they might exterminate us?”

“It is still a matter of wonder how the Martians are able to slay men so swiftly and so silently. Many think that in some way they are able to generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute non-conductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror of unknown composition, much as the parabolic mirror of a lighthouse projects a beam of light. But no one has absolutely proved these details”

“He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power.”

“Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.”