Top 1200 Medieval War Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.

Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It's that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.

This is what war does. Right here, in my hands. This is war.

We think of medieval England as being a place of unbelievable cruelty and darkness and superstition. We think of it as all being about fair maidens in castles, and witch-burning, and a belief that the world was flat. Yet all these things are wrong.

I don't think we're at war with Islam. I don't think we're at war with all Muslims. I think we're at war with jihadists.

The war on drugs is a war against the communities.

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

For what can war, but endless war, still breed?

There's nothing I don't know about war. The stench of it. But I say that without any pride. War is a terrible thing. My hope is that you'll get that through looking at one of my pictures.

My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

The principal cause of war is war itself.

So far as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense new provinces.

When two great powers disagree about anything - it doesn't matter what - they must find a way to settle it somehow by arbitration or by negotiation, not by war or threat of war.

Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war.

Beginning in the 11th century, a less-fragmented Europe began to take shape, and what we now call medieval culture - in which literature and learning made a noticeable rebound - spread through much of the territory Rome had once dominated.

I considered the prevention of war as the test of our security policy; in addition to being able to rapidly and forcefully end any war forced upon us.

I would say we must win the information war against ISIS. Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it.

I grew up under the spell of London. Illustrator Kerry Lee's evocative 1950 wall map of the city hung above our breakfast table at home in Canada. Over my corn flakes, I traced the capital's high roads and medieval alleys.

The only war is the war against the imagination.

All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

"World War III, was the Cold War".

It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom.

You'd have civil war. You'd have a race war in this country.

A war put off is not a war avoided.

War is by definition the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate. . . . We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.

Compromise is not such ignoble and deplorable a thing as we generally think. It is rather an indispensable factor in the political strategy. Any nation that rises against the oppressors is bound to fail in the beginning and to gain partial reforms during the medieval period of its struggle through compromises.

No stigma attaches to the love of money in America, and provided it does not exceed the bounds imposed by public order, it is held in honor. The American will describe as noble and estimable ambition that our medieval ancestors would have called base cupidity.

I don't get that - people going to war over religion. I don't know, I could see going to war over justice or democracy or even revenge. But if you're going to war over religion, now you're just killing people in an argument over who has the better imaginary friend.

I was in the midst of it all - saw war where war is worst - not on the battlefields, no - in the hospitals ... there I mixed with it: and now I say God damn the wars - allw ars: God damn every war: God damn 'em! God damn 'em!

There is fear of impoverishment as a narrowly based ideological government, infused with medieval religious rectitude, lays waste to the Egyptian economy, which, given the economy's precariousness, is a clear and present danger to the daily life of millions of Egyptians.

The importance of fear as a factor in war-making cannot be overlooked, and can hardly be overestimated. Any politician can play on panic when he wishes to stampede a people into war.

The left have taken a really beautiful thing, male-female relationships, and turned them into a battle, a political battle, an ideological war. And if you doubt me, what is the War on Women? What the hell is it? How crazy is that entire concept, that there is a political party conducting a War on Women because they hate them. And the fact that they can sell that to their voters and make political gain on that basis is damn amazing to me. And yet how many people do you know who really believe that there's a War on Women, that Republicans/conservatives don't like women?

Icon of Prague, the medieval bridge crossed the Vltava between Old Town and the Little Quarter. Gothic bridge towers rose on both sides, and the whole span — pedestrian-only — was lined by monumental statues of saints.

Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: 'War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.'

In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.

One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression. Patriotism becomes the order of the day, and those who question the war are seen as traitors, to be silenced and imprisoned.

I decorated my house like a medieval gothic castle, European-style. Chandeliers and red velvet curtains. My bedroom is pink and black, my bathroom is totally Hello Kitty, I have a massive pink couch and a big antique gold cross.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

The war on drugs is really no war at all - it's a business!

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

War is life war is the origin of all things.

I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.

After a Polish Pope, whose country was first to be invaded by the Germans in World War Two, we now have someone from the generation drafted at the close of the war.

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.

There is no lie in war or preparation of war that can't be defended.

I think everybody should have an interest in peace prevailing and the ridiculousness, the bestiality of war. I don't have any time for that. Anybody pulling a trigger is wrong. There is no right in war.

The Iraq War was the first conflict in western history in which an imperialist war was massively protested against before it had even been launched.

The use of our military in combat should first require declaration of war. I have long called for reinstating the military draft, simply because I believe strongly that a national decision to go to war must also include a broad commitment to share its burdens. Whenever Congress decides to fund a war or other U.S. combat activities, it must provide a means to pay for it-then and there-not later. If we don't have the will to fully share the burdens of war, then we have no right to send our sons and daughters into harm's way.

So many of the fantasy stories I encountered growing up were set in worlds that were largely modelled on medieval Europe in one way or another. Lots of white folks in feudal societies, castles and kings, that kind of thing.

People are worried about if somebody's going to say that I'm Islamophobic or what have you. This is craziness because we are at war. That's why I asked congress, go ahead and declare the war .

War is not something that can be won. Everybody loses at war.

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War. This Jewish/non-Jewish Elite used the First World War to secure the Balfour Declaration and the principle of the Jewish State of Israel.

Another term for preventive war is aggressive war - starting wars because someday somebody might do something to us. That is not part of the American tradition.