Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tim O'Brien

I was a coward. I went to the war.

Tim O'Brien

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

Tim O'Brien

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

Tim O'Brien

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

Tim O'Brien

A true war story is never moral...

Tim O'Brien

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Tim O'Brien

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Tilda Swinton

This film [Doctor Strange] kind of takes that everyday boring reality and really bursts it wide. So we talked a lot about that. In many ways there's something very practical about this world, the Kamar-Taj. It's - You know, we all look like samurai warriors, but actually there are iPads everywhere and there's a feeling that it's a practical possibility for this modern world that the Doctor Strange universe is functioning, and that we know it and it's around the corner for all of us.

Thomas Szasz

The two greatest enemies of the individual in the modern world are communism and psychiatry. Each wages a relentless war against that which makes a person an individual: communism against the ownership of property, psychiatry against the ownership of the self (mind and body). Communists criminalize the autonomous use of capital and labor, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in the black market, especially in foreign currencies. Psychiatrists criminalize the autonomous use of the self, and harshly punish those who "traffic" in self-abuse, especially in self-medication and self-destruction.

Thomas Jefferson

My views and feelings (are) in favor of the abolition of war-and I hope it is practicable, by improving the mind and morals of society, to lessen the disposition to war; but of its abolition I despair.

Thomas Jefferson

Having seen the people of all other nations bowed down to the earth under the wars and prodigalities of their rulers, I have cherished their opposites, peace, economy, and riddance of public debt, believing that these were the high road to public as well as private prosperity and happiness.

Thomas Jefferson

They are nations of eternal war. All their energies are expended in the destruction of the labor, property, and lives of their people.

Thomas Jefferson

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves.

Thomas Jefferson

We prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form and to any people whatever.

Thomas Jefferson

If ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence.

Steven Wright

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

Steven Seagal

There was a time when I thought I was doing a good thing with good guys for a good cause. Looking back, I think I really wanted to be a warrior.

Steven Seagal

Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist.

Steven Spielberg

I've just always had a personal fascination with the myth of Abraham Lincoln. And once you start to read about him and the Civil War and everything leading up to the Civil War, you start to understand that the myth is created when we think we understand a character and we reduce him to a kind of cultural national stereotype.

Steven Spielberg

I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.

Steven Spielberg

I'm as guilty as anyone, because I helped to herald the digital era with _Jurassic Park (1993). But the danger is that it can be abused to the point where nothing is eye-popping any more. The difference between making Jaws (1975) 31 years ago and War of .

Steven Spielberg

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

Steven Spielberg

For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.

Steven Spielberg

Before statehood was achieved, Syria and Egypt had their tanks and military equipment lined up to invade Tel Aviv and destroy it; but the Israelis scrambled together an air force, some of it from old Second World War Messerschmidts, and the invasion was halted.

Steven Spielberg

When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them.

Steven Spielberg

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

Steven Spielberg

I interviewed survivors, I went to Poland, saw the cities and spent time with the people and spoke to the Jews who had come back to Poland after the war and talked about why they had come back.

Richard Cobden

From 1836, down to last year, there is no proof of the Government having any confidence in the duration of peace, or possessing increased security against war.

Richard Cobden

Let it never be forgotten that it is not by means of war that states are rendered fit for the enjoyment of constitutional freedom; on the contrary, whilst terror and bloodshed reign in the land, involving men's minds in the extremities of hopes and fears, there can be no process of thought, no education going on, by which alone can a people be prepared for the enjoyment of rational liberty.

Richard Cobden

Wars have ever been but another aristocratic mode of plundering and oppressing commerce.

Raymond Aron

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Robert Bourassa

There was no censorship of the press: in general, the War Measures Act could have been made even more radical.

Tom Shadyac

I didn't want to hear the usual answers about what's wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways.