soldiers Quotes

“They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army.”

“I don’t like it, papa,” she said. “But then I dare say soldiers - even brave ones - don’t really like going into battle.”

“Would that I were still young and strong as I was in those days, for then some one of you swineherds would give me a cloak both out of good will and for the respect due to a brave soldier; but now people look down upon me because my clothes are shabby.”

“Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies.”

“We lost a few adult soldiers on our side and my friends Musa and Josiah. Musa, the storyteller, was gone. There was no one around to tell us stories and make us laugh at times when we needed it. ”

“Tears formed in my eyes and my forehead became warm, thinking about what Saidu had said. I tried not to believe that I too was dying, slowly, on my way to find safety.”

“Keep the commission D’Artagnan-the profession of arms suits you; you will be a brave and adventurous captain.”

“He looked at Kaz Brekker, a boy whose only cause was himself. Still, he was a survivor, and his own kind of soldier.”

“Three marines made a fire team, three fire teams made a squad, three squads made a platoon, three platoons made a company, three companies made a battalion, and three battalions made a regiment.”

″‘Those poor people,’ Father echoed. But to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the soldiers now forming into ranks to march away. ‘I pity the poor Germans, Corrie. They have touched the apple of God’s eye.‘”

“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”

“Without any violation of the principles of the constitution, the general of the Roman armies might receive and exercise an authority almost despotic over the soldiers, the enemies, and the subjects of the republic.”

“A lot of these men had started as afraid of war as anyone, but the fear had been drummed out.”

“They were an all-star football team that had endured bruising, exhausting, dangerous practice sessions twelve hours a day, seven days a week—for years—without ever getting to play a game.”

“America’s best were going to war, and Sergeant Matt Eversmann was among them.”

“He knew their faces so well they were like brothers.”

“In the simulations, my blood pressure and heart rate would start out steady. Then, once we got into a firefight, they would drop. I would just sit there and do everything I had to do, real comfortable. As soon as it was over and things were peaceful, my heart rate would just zoom.”

“When he reenlisted anyway, I thought, Okay. Now I know. Being a SEAL is more important to him than being a father or a husband.”

“One time I woke up to him grabbing my arm with both of his hands. One hand was on the forearm and one just slightly above my elbow. He was sound asleep and appeared to be ready to snap my arm in half, I stayed as still as possible and kept repeating his name, getting louder each time so as not to startle him, but also to stop the impending damage to my arm. Finally, he woke and let go. Slowly, we settled into some new habits, and adjusted.”

“I signed up to protect this country. I do not choose the wars. It happens that I love to fight. But I do not choose which battles I go to. Y’all send me to them. I had to wonder why these people weren’t protesting at their congressional offices or in Washington. Protesting the people who were ordered to protect them—let’s just say it put a bad taste in my mouth.”

“I thought Ryan was dead. Actually, he was still alive, if just barely. The docs worked like hell to save him. Ryan would eventually be medevac’d out of Iraq. His wounds were severe—he’d never see again, not only out of the eye that had been hit but the other as well. It was a miracle that he lived. But at that moment at base, I was sure he was dead. I knew it in my stomach, in my heart, in every part of me. I’d put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he’d been shot.”

“You could send in your bleeding-heart do-gooders, you could hold hands and pray and sing hootenanny songs and invoke the great gods CNN and BBC, but the only way to finally open the roads to the big-eyed babies was to show up with more guns.”

“Soldiering was about fighting. It was about killing people before they killed you.”

“But that’s politics for you: a bunch of game-players sitting around congratulating each other in safety while real lives are getting screwed up.”

“But I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq.”

“His being higher in learning and birth than the ruck o’ soldiers is anything but a proof of his worth. It shows his course to be down’ard.”

″ War don’t ennoble men. It turns them into dogs... poisons the soul.”

“Heeding that call was a band of elite warriors who’d left the United States military and had joined a clandestine organization that protected American covert intelligence operatives abroad.”

″... the former SEAL, with the infectious smile and abundant best friends, who served bravely in the Gulf War, who soared airborne on skis, surfboards and good times... lay stationary and silent.”

″...the Distinguished Intelligence Cross, the highest honor bestowed by the CIA. The award goes to clandestine service members for “a voluntary act or acts of extraordinary heroism involving the acceptance of existing dangers with conspicuous fortitude and exemplary courage.”

″... they weren’t just any guys with guns. The operators were disciplined and experienced, abundantly armed and as expertly trained as any force their size on the planet.”

″‘Yeah, we’re going to unleash hate on these guys’. He was ready to go to war, and he didn’t care how many of them were coming.”

“The first day in Oakland he and Rocky walked down the street together and a big Chrysler stopped in the street and an old white woman rolled down the window and said, ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed.”

“You hardly know me, Johnny, so I beg you to believe my reputation: I’m a constant soldier and a sometime poet and I will be King.”

“Don’t have any silly ideas about soldiers. Soldiers have mothers, you know, and most of us end up as farmers and fishermen like everyone else.”

“I just don’t understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.”

“He was too good a soldier to go around asking questions, trying to round out his knowledge. A soldier’s knowledge wasn’t supposed to be round.”

“At the hospital they even had to explain to Unk that there was a radio antenna under the crown of his skull, and that it would hurt him whenever he did something a good soldier wouldn’t ever do. The antenna also would give him orders and furnish drum music to march to. They said that not just Unk but everybody had an antenna like that—doctors and nurses and four-star generals included. It was a very democratic army, they said.”

“When the soldier of a civilized power is killed in action his limbs are composed and his body is borne by friendly arms reverently to the grave. The wail of the fifes, the roll of the drums, the triumphant words of the Funeral Service, all divest the act of its squalor, and the spectator sympathises with, perhaps almost envies, the comrade who has found this honourable exit. ”

“He heard the soft ‘shu-u-u’ of the mortarshell for perhaps half a second. There was not even time to connect it with himself and frighten him, before there was a huge sunburst roaring of an explosion almost on top of him, then black blank darkness. He had a vague impression that someone screamed but did not know it was himself. ”

“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die….”

“I have tried to gild war, and to solace myself for the loss of dear and gallant friends, with the thought that a soldier’s death for a cause that he believes in will count for much, whatever may be beyond this world.”

“When the soldier of a civilized power is killed in action his limbs are composed and his body is borne by friendly arms reverently to the grave. The wail of the fifes, the roll of the drums, the triumphant words of the Funeral Service, all divest the act of its squalor, and the spectator sympathises with, perhaps almost envies, the comrade who has found this honourable exit. ”

“They had crossed a strange line; they had become wounded men; and everybody realized, including themselves, dimly, that they were now different. Of itself, the shocking physical experience of the explosion, which had damaged them and killed those others, had been almost identically the same for them as for those other ones who had gone on with it and died. The only difference was that now these, unexpectedly and illogically, found themselves alive again.”

“In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.”

“We were a family. How’d it break up and come apart, so that now we’re turned against each other? Each standing in the other’s light. How’d we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What’s keepin’ us from reaching out, touching the glory?”

“I’ve lived with these men, sir, for two and a half years and I will not order them all to their deaths.”

“Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die….”

“You’re my light. My guide.”

“If there is no work, make it up, for when soldiers have time to talk, their talk turns to fear. Action, on the other hand, produces the appetite for more action.”

“If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously . . . we will make it so.”

“Good soldiers know that if they don’t recognize who their enemy is, they are destined to lose the war. That is also true for those of us who battle in God’s army.”

“Our battle is spiritual, and what we accomplish in the spirit realm is as important as what the highly trained, prepared, and equipped soldier does in the physical. We must know our weapons and be highly skilled in using them. But first we must put on the armor God has given us in order to stand strong against”

“Never had I uttered such a speech before. Never had I thought myself capable of it. Never have I made such a speech again. Because, perhaps, never did such anger seize me as possessed me that day. Upstairs in the ruins of my home foreign soldiers were fighting for my country. Here in the cellar I was fighting for myself.”

The child is caught in the web of the judicial system as his foster care and sanctuary are determined. While the story has all the elements of a gripping tale, it often reads like a first, rough draft. A prelude to the book, titled “Ethiopia,” finds soldiers barging into the Kelos’ house.

“Every day the huge wooden gate they called the Skaian Gate, which faced the Plain and the sea beyond the Plain, opened wide, and the chariots poured through, filled with armed soldiers.”

Shooting and shouting result, and the family is ordered to leave the country. An almost duplicate scene labeled “Eritrea” follows. In an effort to show that neither country embraces the union of this Ethiopian man and Eritrean woman and its progeny, the question immediately arises, are the soldiers Ethiopian or Eritrean?

“Lord Hector always led them out. Behind the chariots came the foot soldiers. The Greeks came, too, in chariots and on foot, from the tents that they had put up on the beach, and then both armies began to hack and stab one another and many died.”

“Topthorn and I were hitched up side by side to an old hay cart and [...] driven up through the woods, back toward the thunder of the gunfire and the wounded that awaited us.”

“It was the mud that was killing us one by one—the mud, the lack of shelter, and the lack of food.”

“I stood in a wide corridor of mud, a wasted, shattered landscape, between two vast, unending rolls of barbed wire. [...] This was what the soldiers called “no-man’s-land.”

“AN ELDER was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away? The soldier replied and said: No. I will mend it and put it back on. The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image?”

“Many, many years ago there was an emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on his attire. He did not care about his soldiers, or attending the theater, or even going for a drive in the park, unless it was to show off his new clothes.”

“While he is playing soccer one day, Pedro witnesses his friend Daniel’s father, the owner of the local grocery store, being taken away by soldiers.”

″ ‘Why, David,’ said [Alan], ‘the innocent have aye a chance to get assoiled in court; but for the lad that shot the bullet, I think the best place for him will be the heather. Them that havenae dipped their hands in any little difficulty, should be very mindful of the case of them that have. And that is the good Christianity. For if it was the other way round about, and the lad whom I couldnae just clearly see had been in our shoes, and we in his (as might very well have been), I think we would be a good deal obliged to him oursel’s if he would draw the soldiers.’ ”

“One of the compensations for wearing a uniform and earning less money than an equally talented man can make in the real world is the off chance of being killed.”

“She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur’s soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote.”

“Next time you see me, my dancin’ days will be over forever.”

“The soldier saw a wizened little woman wearing what looked like a party dress with layers of other clothes on top, and a woolly hat with a bobble on it. She was pushing a wire cart on wheels. It had a metal label on it.”

“Three soldiers trudged down a road in a strange country. There were on their way home from the wars. Besides being tired, there were hungry. In fact, they had eaten nothing for two days.”

“His dad said that may be over a hundred years old, but that still wasn’t too shocking. No, it was the fact that the soldiers were alive. Magnificently alive. Finding himself now a benevolent deity to a crew of twelve lively individuals, Max befriends his tiny pals and discovers their secrets.

“I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone.”