A Quote by George Santayana
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
It takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery and heavy weapons are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror of what the coalition is doing is not a matter of the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules of engagement. The war itself is the American war crime.
I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.
I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.
... success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier.
The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.
The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty privation and want are the school of the good soldier.
War is a lie. War is a racket. War is hell. War is waste. War is a crime. War is terrorism. War is not the answer.
The whole idea of Captain America was borne of a time 80-something years ago. That was a time of the Second World War, and it was an antifascist idea. You had this idea of it being a soldier-warrior. That was the construct for a hero.
An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.
Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
For it has been said, all that a man hath will he give for his life; and while all contribute of their substance the soldier puts his life at stake, and often yields it up in his country's cause. The highest merit, then is due to the soldier.
The invasion of Iraq was simply a war crime. Straight-out war crime.
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