Kamikaze Quotes

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“My captain on the snowy horse
He's coming back to take me home
(He's coming back to take me home)
He'll find me fighting back the terrible thwarts
'Cause I'm not afraid to die alone!”
― Owl City

“Are you the stuff that hero's are made of? Or are you a jellyfish in a skirt?”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Steal a Dragon's Sword

“I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy considerations, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“Don't launch it," said Bean into his microphone, head down. "Set it off inside your ship. God be with you.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

“N"ayez pas peur du kamikaze.
Ce qui l'intéresse dans le risque de mort, ce n'est pas le risque, c'est la mort. Ce qu'il aime dans la guerre, ce n'est pas "vaincre ou mourir" mais mourir et ne surtout pas vaincre.
Sa grande affaire, ce n'est pas, comme dit Clausewitz, proportionner des efforts à la force de résistance de l'ennemi, le renverser, le réduire - mais mourir.
(ch. 16 Debray, Kojève et le prix du sang)”
― Bernard-Henri Lévy, War, Evil, and the End of History

“Il governo dell'Imperatore fu tinto di due colori: rosso sangue fino al termine della guerra, e dopo iniziò l'epoca del languido grigio cenere. L'Impero fu inonandato di sangue dal giorno in cui Sua Maestà abbandonò alla loro sorte i nostri fratelli maggiori, e si ricoprì di vana cenere il giorno in cui dichiarò la sua umanità, il giorno in cui definì tutto ciò che era accaduto "una concezione immaginaria”
― Yukio Mishima, La voce degli spiriti eroici

“Diventare kamikaze significava divenire noi stessi una divinità. Pur essendo uomini pregavamo noi stessi, e in noi stessi riponevamo la nostra fede. Questa realizzazione era la nostra morte.
Ma affinché anche noi potessimo essere mistici, e l'incarnazione del Dio, era necessario che l'Imperatore rifulgesse sul gradino più alto della divinità. Era quella la sorgente della nostra immortalità, la fonte che avrebbe reso gloriosa la nostra morte, l'unico filo che ci legava al mondo.”
― Yukio Mishima

“—Si no deseabais a una kamikaze como jefa, no haberme dado los mandos del avión.”
― Carlos J. Eguren, Devon Crawford y los guardianes del infinito

“I killed a fruit fly that wouldn't get out of my face by clapping my hands on it. In its last act of kamikaze defiance, the fly hurled its fading carcass into a coffee I had only half-drunk and was enjoying. I had to pour it down the drain. F***er.”
― Stewart Stafford