War Dead Quotes

“In the First World War we lost in all about three million killed. In the Second we lost twenty million (so Khrushchev said; according to Stalin it was only seven million. Was Nikita being too generous? Or couldn't Iosif keep track of his capital?) All those odes! All those obelisks and eternal flames! Those novels and poems! For a quarter of a century all Soviet literature has been drunk on that blood!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books V-VII

“These boys would be better off hog-tied than playing for a woman!” shouted another. The discordant men gathered at the back exit. Moonshiner opened the door and they poured out, while inside we could hear in the distance the sound of a plane flying into our airfield. We knew another body was likely on board, this time carrying the remains of a soldier from a neighboring town.”
― Marjorie Herrera Lewis, When the Men Were Gone

“it would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. . . . he saw himself walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories

“a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones . . . in such a way that there were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Remaking History and Other Stories

“smoking kills
and killing smokes.”
― Roy Duffield, Bacchus Against the Wall

“I told her about the journey I'd just begun, and asked why she thought Southerners still cared about the Civil War.

"War Between the States," she gently corrected me. "The answer is family. We grow up knowing who's once removed and six times down. Northerners say, 'Forget the War, it's over.' But they don't have the family Bibles we do, filled with all these kinfolk who went off to war and died. We've lost so much."

Strictly speaking, she was right. Roughly half of modern-day white Southerners descended from Confederates, and one in four Southern men of military age died in the War. For Yankee men, the death rate was about one in ten, and waves of post-War immigration left a far lower ratio of Northerners with blood ties to the conflict.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War