Military Quotes - page 87
Extermination had begun. A thick rain of missiles streaked through the sky and landed on hospitals, schools, bridges, homes, mosques, businesses, and military targets. The missile crews and jet pilots didn't know what they were blowing up or why. [...] No one questioned why entire blocks - eventually entire cities - were being annihilated. Everyone did his job as if it were nothing more than delivering packages.
Scott Adams
Many U.S. troops occupy countries that are no threat to the U.S. and many innocent civilians have been killed. I don't find that heroic at all. But most "grunts” are from poor, working-class.... So they believe the recruiters and join the military. I see most of the U.S. military as victims, not heroes. Of course, no one statement covers everything adequately.
Cindy Sheehan
I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, "Take off your hat when you see the flag!” I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?
Eugène Ionesco
The battle of the Falklands was a remarkable military operation, boldly planned, bravely executed, and brilliantly accomplished. We owe an enormous debt to the British forces and to the Merchant Marine. We honour them all. They have been supported by a people united in defence of our way of life and of our sovereign territory.
Diana Gould
There is particular danger at the moment that powerful political alignments in the United States are pushing strongly to exacerbate the developing crisis with Russia. The New York Times, which broke the story that the Kremlin had been paying the Afghan Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers, has been particularly assiduous in promoting the tale of perfidious Moscow. Initial Times coverage, which claimed that the activity had been confirmed by both intelligence sources and money tracking, was supplemented by delusional nonsense from former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who asks "Why does Trump put Russia first?” before calling for a "swift and significant U.S. response.” Rice, who is being mentioned as a possible Biden choice for Vice President, certainly knows about swift and significant as she was one of the architects of the destruction of Libya and the escalation of U.S. military and intelligence operations directed against a non-threatening Syria.
Susan Rice
Related to this is the surgery of wounds arising in military service, which concerns the extraction of missiles. In city practice experience of these is but little, for very rarely even in a whole lifetime are there civil or military combats. In fact such things occur most frequently and continuously in armies abroad. Thus, the person intending to practice this kind of surgery must serve in the army, and accompany it on expeditions abroad; for in this way he would become experienced in this practice.
Hippocrates
If only we could get hold of a German atomic physicist, we felt, we could soon find out what the rest of them were up to. To us physicists the problem seemed very simple. Even those of us who were not working on the atom bomb project knew pretty well what was going on over here. No amount of military security could have prevented us from knowing, difficult as it was for the military to understand this. Active scientists engaged in the same general field of research inevitably form a kind of clan; they work closely together and know all about each other's specialities and whereabouts. You can't take a group of key scientists from their accustomed haunts and have them disappear in some remote place in New Mexico, together with their families, without their colleagues who are left behind wondering about it and deriving the right conclusions. The same thing, we knew, would be true of the Germans.
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
Senator Adi Koila Nailatikau and now interim military government minister: "The commander is doing a wonderful job because he is not only speaking in his personal capacity as Commander. He is speaking as the Commander of the Fiji battalion in Fiji and those serving overseas, and he has the support of the silent majority." (24 July 2005, referring to Bainimarama's opposition to the Reconciliation and Unity Bill (q.v).
Frank Bainimarama
This is the so-called theory that "weapons decide everything", which constitutes a mechanical approach to the question of war and a subjective and one-sided view. Our view is opposed to this; we see not only weapons but also people. Weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor; it is people, not things, that are decisive. The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.
Mao Zedong
A day after that, President Poroshenko declared martial law, and three days later the US declared that they need to increase their military presence in the Black Sea.... an incident was inflated into a scandal... used to shore up the absolutely groundless hopes of the incumbent president of Ukraine... in line with the US plans to build up its military presence near our shores. If you follow the logic of "who stands to gain?” you can draw your own conclusions.
Sergey Lavrov
A few years ago, the family of the inventor of the AR-15 said he would have been horrified to know that its design was being used to slaughter children and other innocent lives instead of being used as a military weapon on the battlefields, as it was designed - that's what it was designed for.
Enough. Enough.
Joe Biden
The Intercept conducted an exhaustive analysis of Biden's political career with a focus on his positions on dozens of U.S. wars and military campaigns, CIA covert actions, and abuses of power; his views on whistleblowers and leakers; and his shifting stance on the often contentious relationship between the executive and legislative branches over war powers.
The picture that emerges is of a man who is dedicated to the U.S. as an empire, who believes that preserving U.S. national interests and "prestige” on the global stage outweigh considerations of morality or even at times the deaths of innocent people. It also reveals a politician who consistently claims to hold bedrock principles but who often strays from those positions in support of a partisan agenda or because he wants a policy adopted regardless of the hypocrisy or contradictions. Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than on U.S. wars.
Joe Biden
To imitate the ostrich in political matters has never been a satisfactory method of avoiding danger; yet this is what Hitler, as well as his more important political, economic and even military advisers, chose to do over and over again. The consequences of this deliberate blindness in the face of hard facts were devastating; and it was we who now had to bear them.
Heinz Guderian
As my former colleague Milton Friedman often said, ‘Government spending is taxation.' Beyond the essential services government provides - such as roads, courts, schools, police and fire services, and the military - government spending doesn't actually create resources. It just redistributes resources. For every beneficiary of government largesse, there's someone who pays for that largesse.
Arthur Laffer
