A Quote by Adrienne Rich

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Adrienne Rich

Quote Topics

About Absolute Country Failure Feel Feel Good Good Helping Imagination Measure People Political Scientific Themselves War

Quote Author

Adrienne Rich
American - Poet
May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

Adrienne Rich

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Adrienne Rich

You know George W. Bush is a war-time president, he says - proudly. Guess what. War is failure! When you are at war, you have failed! When you have gone to a war of choice and lied about it, you're a double-triple, triple-quadruple failure! Or a warlord. It's called a warlord in other countries. A war time president here. One man's ceiling I guess is another man's floor. George Bush is a warlord. He's a failure!

Janeane Garofalo

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.

Glenn Greenwald

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

George Orwell

You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn't what you'd hoped. Failure means you're learning. Growing. Doing.

Chuck Wendig

People say to me, Hey, Bill, the war made us feel better about ourselves. Really? What kind of people are these with such low self-esteem that they need a war to feel better about themselves? May I suggest, instead of a war to feel better about yourself, perhaps... sit-ups? Maybe a fruit cup? Eight glasses of water a day?

Bill Hicks

War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Bill Moyers

People say the war in Iraq is a bad war, and the war in Afghanistan is a good war, but what's the difference between them? Democratic people around the world cannot accept that this is a good war. This is just endless war.

Malalai Joya

Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.

Andrew Sullivan

War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

Michael Morpurgo

War is tragedy. The great war stories are tragedies. It's the failure of diplomacy. 'War and Peace,' 'A Farewell to Arms,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' Those are some of the greatest tragedies.

David Mamet

The terror of failure can make you feel like a failure. So a bunch of people think you're not very good at your thing. How much do you invest in what they say? How much do you care? Failure is not putting yourself on the line.

Dylan Moran

...liberals said the war was a failure because we hadn't captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Then we killed al-Zarqawi and a half-dozen of his aides in an air raid. Then they said the war was a failure because ... you get the picture.