Combat Quotes - page 17
Men who hover over their opponents have no cause to evolve a science of wrestling; and Theseus is conventionally shown in combat with hulking of monstrous enemies, living by his wits. The tradition that he emulated the feats of Herakles may well embalm some ancient sneer at the over-compensation of a small assertive man. Napoleon comes to mind.
If one examines the legend in this light, a well-defined personality emerges. It is that of a light-weight; brave and aggressive, physically tough and quick; highly sexed and rather promiscuous; touchily proud, but with a feeling for the underdog; resembling Alexander in his precocious competence, gift of leadership, and romantic sense of destiny.
Mary Renault
In 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, I was the Delta Force commander during the events most commonly referred to as "Black Hawk Down." Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in the city of five million people, where most of those people were starving refugees. Within thirty minutes of the first chopper being shot down, the second one was shot down. When the first chopper went down I sent every one of my soldiers who were already fighting in the city to go rescue the crew and passengers of the first crash. I was left with few options when the second helo went down over a mile away from the first crash. I had to pull together a second rescue effort using those soldiers, sailors, and airmen who were left in the base- many of whom were not combat arms specialties (they were clerks, mechanics, communicators, and supply people). To their credit, every man was eager to be part of the effort to rescue their brothers at the second crash site.
William G. Boykin
The thing is that religion itself cannot but be dynamic which is why "return" is an incorrect term. A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust. Our guns will thunder no more. The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey. Whatever of glory must be won in the council or the closet, never again in the field. I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
She is brave, beautiful, loyal, kind and generous. She is never boring and is as lovely looking in a GI shirt, pants and combat boots as she is at night or on the screen. She has an honesty and a comic and tragic sense of life that never let her be truly happy unless she loves. When she loves she can joke about it; but it is gallows humor.
Marlene Dietrich
I am at the moment trying to write a novel, a combat novel, which, in addition to being a work which tells the truth about warfare as I saw it, would free all these young men from the horseshit which has been engrained in them by my generation. I don't think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won't even accept these words as terms of human reference any more. And anyway, hell, they don't even apply to what, in actual fact, modern warfare has become.
James Jones
Combatting the nuclear threat has been our exclusive preoccupation, since we are dedicated to the proposition that to insure the conditions of life, we must prevent the conditions of death. Ultimately, we believe people must come to terms with the fact that the struggle is not between different national destinies, between opposing ideologies, but rather between catastrophe and survival. All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are their shared enemy.
Bernard Lown
No nation is immune to dangerous and disruptive weather patterns, so every nation is going to have to do its part. And the United States is ready to do ours. Last year, I introduced America's first-ever Climate Action Plan to use more clean energy and less dirty energy, and cut the dangerous carbon pollution that contributes to climate change. So we want to cooperate with countries in Southeast Asia to do the same, to combat the destruction of our forests. We can't condemn future generations to a planet that is beyond fixing. We can only do that together.
Barack Obama
Not only do Western countries take unfriendly measures against our countries in the economic dimension, I mean the illegal sanctions that everyone knows about very well, but also the top officials of leading NATO countries allow themselves to make aggressive statements with regards to our country. That is why I order the defense minister and chief of the general staff to put Russian deterrence forces on high combat alert.
Vladimir Putin
I don't make the infantryman look noble, because he couldn't look noble even if he tried. Still there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties.
Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other.
Bill Mauldin
Right after September 11, the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Zoellick, said the first thing that had to be done to combat terrorism was to pass fast-track. Now that should really make Osama bin Laden tremble in his boots - that the President has Kremlin-style authority to sign economic agreements.
Noam Chomsky
I think that it came as a surprise, if not a shock, to most people, when that notorious advertisement appeared in The Times in 1967, to find that there is a lobby in favour of legalising cannabis. ... The existence of this lobby is something that the House and public opinion should take into account and be ready to combat, as I am. It is another aspect of the so-called permissive society, and I am glad if my decision has enabled the House to call a halt in the advancing tide of so-called permissiveness. I regard it as one of the most unlikeable words that has been invented in recent years.
James Callaghan
