I understood that ‘The Yellow Birds’ would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.
I’d like to see a world free of strife, stress, pain, hunger, war – a cool place where everyone could live.
The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that – and who won’t leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn’t.
Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we’ll still be heartbroken.
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.
Dropping those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a war crime.
War is never a lasting solution for any problem.
My parents fled from North Korea during the Korean War because they despised the North Korean Communist regime. They fled to seek freedom and came to South Korea.
It is the same in love as in war; a fortress that parleys is half taken.
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Unless a nation’s life faces peril, war is murder.
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guess what was at the other side of the hill’.
Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.
No matter what is happening in life or in the world – war, natural disaster, poor health, pain, the death of loved ones – if existence is filled with art, music and literature, life will be fulfilling, a joy.
During the Cold War, the non-aligned movement tried to become a ‘third force’ in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.
Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.
To hold a pen is to be at war.
I don’t write about adolescence. I write about war. For adolescents.
Capitalism is war; socialism is peace.
The war on drugs is wrong, both tactically and morally. It assumes that people are too stupid, too reckless, and too irresponsible to decide whether and under what conditions to consume drugs. The war on drugs is morally bankrupt.
An offensive war, I believe to be wrong and would therefore have nothing to do with it, having no right to meddle with another man’s property, his ox or his ass, his man servant or his maid servant or anything this is his.
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good… when trade stops, war comes.
