#war

The rich old men start the wars, but it’s the poor young men who portend them. If they didn't get old and rich, some excuse might have to be found to launch invasions. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #old-age #poverty #war #wealth

In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet. ↗

— William L. Shirer

#nuclear-weapons #war #weaponry #age

There is no finer sensations in life that which comes with victory over one's self. Go forward to a goal of inward achievement, brushing aside all your old internal enemies as you advance. ↗

— Vash Young

#advance #aside #brushing #comes #finer

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. ↗

— John Hersey

#books #death #hiroshima #japan #ways-to-die

Those darling byegone times, Mr Carker,' said Cleopatra, 'with their delicious fortresses, and their dear old dungeons, and their delightful places of torture, and their romantic vengeances, and their picturesque assaults and sieges, and everything that makes life truly charming! How dreadfully we have degenerated! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#humor #irony #medieval #middle-ages #nostalgia

If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is every completely right for any part, because part in a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something. ↗

— Andy Warhol

#choices #decisions #right #role #warhol

Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love. ↗

— Guy Sajer

#marriage #soldier #war #world-war-ii #age

I am sometimes asked, "How do you know there won't be a war tomorrow (or a genocide, or an act of terrorism) that will refute your whole thesis?" The question misses the point of this book. The point is not that we have entered an Age of Aquarius in which every last earthling has been pacified forever. It is that substantial reductions in violence have taken place, and it is important to understand them. Declines in violence are caused by political, economic, and ideological conditions that take hold in particular cultures at particular times. If the conditions reverse, violence could go right back up. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#genocide #ideology #politics #society #terrorism

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#combat #values-in-life #war #warriors #age

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive). ↗

— W.C. Sellar

#age