Combat Quotes - Page 28

• Won't it be nice when all this beastly killing is over, and we can enjoy ourselves and not hurt anyone? I hate this game.

  Albert Ball

  Hurt, Hate, Nice

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• The heavens were the grandstands and only the gods were spectators. The stake was the world, the forfeit was the player's place at the table, and the game had no recess. It was the most dangerous of all sports and the most fascinating. It got in the blood like wine. It aged men forty years in forty days. It ruined nervous systems in an hour.

  Elliott White Springs

  Sports, Wine, Player

  Elliott White Springs, A. Roy Brown, Floyd Phillips Gibbons, Norman Shannon Hall (1929). “Pilots' Luck”

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• . . . It is as though horror has frozen the blood in my veins, paralyzed my arms, and torn all thought from my brain with the swipe of a paw. I sit there, flying on, and continue to stare, as though mesmerised, at the Cauldron on my left.

  Ernst Udet

  Blood, Flying, Brain

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• I counted them all out and I counted them all back.

  Brian Hanrahan

  History, Aviation

  On the number of British aeroplanes (which he was not permitted to disclose) joining the raid on Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands: BBC broadcast report, 1 May 1982, in 'Battle for the Falklands' (1982) p. 21

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• It got more exciting with each war. I mean the planes were going faster than hell when I was flying a Mustang, but by the time I got to Nam, it scared the piss out of a lot of guys just to fly the damn jets at full speed. Let alone do it in combat.

  Robin Olds

  War, Mean, Guy

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• Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing.

  Philip Alston

  Risk, Audio, Aviation

  "Drone warfare: life on the new frontline" by Chris Woods, www.theguardian.com. February 24, 2015.

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• I observe to the letter all laws that make sense but combat those that are obsolete or absurd.

  Wilhelm Reich

  Law, Letters, Absurd

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• Poverty can't be an excuse for bad teaching, but teaching can't be the only thing we do to combat poverty.

  Tony Danza

  Teaching, Poverty, Excuse

  The Tavis Smiley Show, www.pbs.org. September 19, 2012.

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• Everyone is wounded. No one is healthy enough to never screw up, when you're in combat. But, I like to show that, and I like to show how people get back from that. You have to forgive each other. When you're in the middle of a long-term commitment, the essence of it is that everyone is going to have good days and bad days, and it's about how you continue to rejoin forces.

  Judd Apatow

  Commitment, Good Day, Bad Day

  Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. December 18, 2012.

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• The only way to find out why someone decides to engage in armed combat is to look at their individual personality.

  Salman Rushdie

  Personality, Looks, Way

  "Terror Is Glamour". "Spiegel" Interview, www.spiegel.de. August 28, 2006.

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• It was my view that no kill was worth the life of a wingman. . . . Pilots in my unit who lost wingmen on this basis were prohibited from leading a [section]. The were made to fly as wingman, instead.

  Erich Hartmann

  Views, Pilots, Aviation

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• And I have yet to find one single individual who has attained conspicuous success in bringing down enemy aeroplanes who can be said to be spoiled either by his successes or by the generous congratulations of his comrades. If he were capable of being spoiled he would not have had the character to have won continuous victories, for the smallest amount of vanity is fatal in aeroplane fighting. Self-distrust rather is the quality to which many a pilot owes his protracted existence.

  Eddie Rickenbacker

  Congratulations, Character, Fighting

  Eddie Rickenbacker (2012). “Fighting the Flying Circus”, p.48, Tales End Press

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• In every squadron there were, perhaps, four or five pilots who exuded confidence. They knew that they were going out to shoot. The rest knew sub-consciously, that they would make up the numbers, mill about, and get shot at.

  Lynn Garrison

  Numbers, Going Out, Four

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• Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death.

  Robert S. Johnson

  Reality, Men, Vanity

  Robert S. Johnson, Martin Caidin “Thunderbolt! The Extraordinary Story of a World War II Ace”, Lulu.com

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• The duty of the fighter pilot is to patrol his area of the sky, and shoot down any enemy fighters in that area. Anything else is rubbish.

  Manfred von Richthofen

  Sky, Enemy, Pilots

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• Anybody who doesn't have fear is an idiot. It's just that you must make the fear work for you. Hell when somebody shot at me, it made me madder than hell, and all I wanted to do was shoot back.

  Robin Olds

  Military, Idiot, Hell

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• See, decide, attack, reverse.

  Erich Hartmann

  Aviation, Reverse

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• What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain...To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways.

  Arundhati Roy

  War, Fighting, Our World

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• To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Mean, Evil, Deception

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• Our Party's Songun-based revolutionary leadership, Songun-based politics, is a revolutionary mode of leadership and socialist mode of politics that gives top priority to military affairs, and defends the country, the revolution and socialism and dynamically pushes ahead with overall socialist construction by dint of the revolutionary mettle and combat capabilities of the People's Army.

  Kim Jong Il

  Country, Military, Party

  "The Songun-based Revolutionary Line Is a Great Revolutionary Line of Our Era and an Ever-victorious Banner of Our Revolution". Address to the senior officials of the Central Committee of the Worker's Party, January 29, 2003.

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• Cigars served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life... I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control.

  Sigmund Freud

  Self, Years, Fifty

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• There's not much pressure on the golf Tour. Walking to the first tee is in no way comparable to walking through the jungle in combat

  Larry Nelson

  Golf, Way, Pressure

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• My chief aim was to combat the view that there can be no true morality without supernatural sanctions. So I argued at length that the social, or altruistic, impulses are the real source of morality, and that an ethic based on these impulses has far more claim on our allegiance than an ethic based on obedience to the commands of a God who created tapeworms and cancer-cells.

  Margaret E. Knight

  Real, Cancer, Views

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• He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there and he says to me in this ad, until you have the guts to call me a phony soldier to my face, stop telling lies about my service. You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, and then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media and a TV ad, to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Lying, Stupid, Media

  "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann, www.nbcnews.com. October 4, 2007.

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• We need a president who will lead with a stronger, more consistent foreign policy. We also need our commander in chief to put more faith in military leadership who have all of the combat experience. It’s bad policy to try to micromanage too much operationally and tactically from a desk in the Oval Office.

  Lee Zeldin

  Military, Office, Trying

  "Congress at War". www.politico.com. July, 2015.

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