Military Quotes - Page 37

• Sergeant Bergdahl may have broken any number of military laws.

  Alex Berenson

  Law, Numbers, Broken

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• I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy.

  Karl Marlantes

  Kids, Thinking, Iwo Jima

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• I've always been fascinated by the military, the discipline they have and the sacrifices they make to defend the country. It's something I've always been interested in.

  Troy Polamalu

  Country, Sacrifice, Discipline

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• I am not a politician or a military strategist. I am just a citizen voicing my opinions.

  Cindy Sheehan

  Citizens, Opinion, Politician

  "The "Ist" Du Jour". Interview with Joshua Frank, www.counterpunch.org. October 3, 2005.

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• Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.

  Harold E. Varmus

  War, School, Careers

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• The idea of aerial military surveillance dates back to the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy used hot-air balloons to spy on the other side, tracking troop movements and helping to direct artillery fire.

  Michael Hastings

  War, Air, Ideas

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• During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military conducted only a handful of drone missions.

  Michael Hastings

  Iraq, Invasion, Drones

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• Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.

  Herman Melville

  Selfish, Men, Special

  Herman Melville (1966). “Billy Budd”, p.14, Hayes Barton Press

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• We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common jeopardy.

  Carl Sagan

  Common Humanity, Decision, Support

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.178, Ballantine Books

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• Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Menof cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.

  David Hume

  Reflection, Sublime, Merit

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.521, Delphi Classics

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• First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenceless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided.

  Patrick Henry

  Past, Men, Community

  "Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer", 169, 1788.

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• The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.

  Ron Paul

  Moving, Opportunity, Boston

  "Liberty Was Also Attacked In Boston". www.thedailysheeple.com. April 30, 2013.

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• And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.

  Karl Marlantes

  Stress, Thinking, People

  "'Matterhorn' Author On What It's Like 'To Go To War'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. August 30, 2011.

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• It's hard for me to sympathize with a young person who chooses to go into the military because they know where they're going. I think we need to start depopulating the military.

  Henry Rollins

  Thinking, Needs, Young

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• Israel has legitimate concerns about its security relative to Iran. I mean, you have a large country with a significant military that has proclaimed that Israel shouldn't exist, that has denied the Holocaust, that has financed Hezbollah, and as a consequence, there are missiles that are pointed towards Tel Aviv. There are very good reasons why Israelis are nervous about Iran's position in the world generally.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Mean, Israel

  News Conference on Iran Deal, edition.cnn.com. July 15, 2015.

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• I mean, if you're proud of what you've done when you've served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?

  Karl Marlantes

  Mean, Unhappy, Complaining

  "'Matterhorn' Author On What It's Like 'To Go To War'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. August 30, 2011.

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• My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Block, Father, School

  Interview with Joseph Hooper, www.elle.com. April 15, 2009.

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• A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Beach, War, Moving

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• It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.

  Malcolm Forbes

  War, Moving, Sight

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• Never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

  Thomas Jefferson

  War, Men, Two

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.279, Cambridge University Press

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• It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or forms of government or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the psalmist described as a little lower than the angels ... or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man's destiny.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Struggle, Fall, Angel

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• The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated... The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered... The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.

  C. Wright Mills

  Taken, Government, Order

  "The Power Elite". Book by C. Wright Mills, 1956.

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• It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.

  Marcel Proust

  War, Army, Reality

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• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Life, Death, War

  Men at War introduction (1942)

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• People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

  Norman Mailer

  War, Moving, Past

  Norman Mailer (1972). “Existential errands”, Signet

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