Futility Of War Quotes

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“How could you believe or disbelieve anything anymore? Four maybe five million men killed and none of them wanting to die while hundreds maybe thousands were left crazy or blind or crippled and couldn’t die no matter how hard they tried.”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

“We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheated, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armor, we would all weep.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“...why will men fight and suffer to advance the interests of their masters, who fling them aside when they have no further use for them?”
― Arthur Findlay

“They have lied to us. They can't keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies. What have they ever given us in return for the trust, the love--They actually say 'love'--we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything? Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe. We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the truth.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference...”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“We do not respect our enemies; we despair of them. Your struggle, your fierce will to prevail in spite of all, we do not admire this. We see only a terrible, senseless waste of life – both ours and yours. We see murdered potential, young men and women who might have become anything becoming only corpses through one woman’s dreams of conquering a city she has not even seen.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, War Master's Gate

“Pour mon père, le patriotisme sentait la mort, il n’y accordait que du mépris...et aux frontières peu de vertus.

[…]

Les thèses pacifistes de mon père, le dégoût de la guerre, je les servais avec la conviction superficielle des idées acquises par héritage. Juliette les trouvait indécentes.”
― Jean-Pierre Gibrat, Mattéo, première époque (1914-1915)

“in any war a victory means another war, and yet another, until someday inevitably the tides turn, and the victor is the vanquished, and the circle reverses itself, but remains nevertheless a circle.”
― Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds

“I heard the military bands playing with false and terrible cheer in the streets as the recruits went off to war [WW1]. I had beat the bed with my fists then, and cried tears of rage that young men must march off to this artful ad calculated accompaniment to places where wagon roads would be laid across their bones.”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“On these forgotten islands they rest, and the sand packs tight around them while their friends have gone on to other islands, to die on other beaches. The little invasions, the crumbs of global warfare, eventually to be remembered only by mapmakers and mothers.”
― William Chapman White, The Pale Blonde of Sands Street

“No, my mother died when I was ten. She was a Corps diplomat and was murdered trying to negotiate a truce with the enemy.”
“The enemy in that war you fought in?”
“Yes. It’s why I joined up. I was young and naïve and somehow thought I could avenge her death.”
“You couldn’t because you lost the war?”
“No, we won – but there’s no vengeance to be found in war. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Good. I hope you never do.”
― Felicia Watson, The Risks of Dead Reckoning

“He was actually glad to be alone with his silence and the remains of those who had died. These men hadn’t cared about the squabbles of those born with lighter eyes than they. These men had cared about their families or—at the very least—their sphere pouches. How many of them were trapped in this foreign land, these endless plateaus, too poor to escape back to Alethkar? Hundreds died each week, winning gems for men who were already rich, winning vengeance for a king long dead.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings (1 of 5) [Dramatized Adaptation]

“This man has suggested that we might have made some lasting peace with the Empire, after the last war – that we might have found enough common ground to prevent this new conflict coming to pass. I admit I was too busy preparing for this day to even consider it, but he’s right. A lasting and honest peace between our people could accomplish great things, and the world would be so much the richer. Leadswell has overlooked one thing, however. He believes that your people are men as deserving as any to enjoy life and happiness, but he forgets that your own leaders do not share that belief. If they did, none of this could come about. To your Empress and her court, you and all your soldiers are nothing more than a sword to strike out at the world with, and keep striking until either the world or the sword breaks. Until your Empire is ruled with some acceptance that human life has a value – irrespective of whether that life is Imperial or Collegiate or your poor bloody Auxillians – then all this man’s good intentions will go to naught, and we will continue to resist you. We cannot be slaves, and under Imperial rule, everyone is a slave, bar one.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, War Master's Gate