Passages about war

I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man.

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.

Solon tells Croesus that no one can be called happy while he still lives, since a god can throw down the most fortunate man at the end, and only a finished life can be judged.

The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.

For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the way to understanding, has ordained the fixed law that wisdom comes by suffering.

The watchman on the roof says he has been lying there a year like a dog, learning the stars by heart, and that he would speak if the house could bear it, but an ox stands on his tongue.

Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes.

Above him there was now nothing but the sky, the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds slowly creeping across it.

A great ox stands upon my tongue.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the road to understanding, who made it law that by suffering they shall learn.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see.

Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us to the point where we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

We must give up sex altogether. Why are you turning away? Where are you going? Why are you biting your lips and shaking your heads? Why have you gone pale?

First we wash the fleece to get the muck out. You should do the same with the city: beat out the scoundrels, pick off the burrs, card the ones who clump together for office, and comb the whole lot into one basket.

I know that by nature you are not the sort to say such things or to devise mischief. But the prize of victory is sweet to win, so bring yourself to do it, and we shall be shown to be just another time.

Everything becomes disgust when a man abandons his own nature and does what does not befit him.

The secret of empire was now revealed, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome.

By general consent he would have been judged capable of ruling, if only he had never ruled.

Roland is brave and Oliver is wise, and both are men of amazing courage.

Companion Roland, sound your horn of ivory. Charles will hear it and the army will turn back. Roland answers: God forbid that my kinsmen should be blamed for me, or that sweet France should fall into disgrace.

For I, that God of Loves servantz serve, Ne dar to Love, for myn unliklynesse, Preyen for speed, al sholde I therfore sterve.

I am myn owene womman, wel at ese.

All their life was spent not by laws, statutes or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. Their rule was this one clause: Do what you will.

I would rather have you learn nothing than learn such books under such masters, for their learning is but stupidity and their wisdom a sham, bastardising good and noble minds and spoiling the flower of youth.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Saul was head and shoulders taller than any of the people. When Samuel said to all the people, Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? there is none like him among all the people, all the people shouted, Long live the king!

You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?

Hecuba learns that her daughter Cassandra, the prophetess whose warnings no one ever believed, has been allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine, a fate Cassandra herself receives not with despair but with a wild, prophetic joy the other characters find deeply unsettling.

Andromache, widow of Hector, learns she is being given to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, the very man responsible for her husband's death, and must accept this fate while still grieving Hector and now facing the additional horror of her young son's impending execution.

You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do not let the fruits be the motive for your actions, and do not let your attachment be to inaction.

The soul is never born, and never dies. It is not slain when the body is slain. Weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it away.

A Greek hostage in Rome set out to explain how Rome conquered nearly the whole known world in fifty-three years, from 220 to 167 BCE, treating this rapid conquest's speed and scope as the central historical puzzle requiring genuine explanation.

The surviving books cover the Punic Wars, Hannibal's crossing of the Alps and Cannae, the wars in Greece and Macedon, and the sack of Carthage, giving detailed access to the actual military campaigns through which Rome achieved its expansion.

The father himself willed that the way of tillage should not be easy, and first stirred the fields by art, sharpening mortal wits with cares, so that labour conquered all, unrelenting labour and want pressing in hard times.

The first book ends with the sun darkened and the portents at Caesar's death, wars across the world, and a prayer that the gods allow Octavian to rescue an age overturned, the farmer's ploughshare turning up rusted javelins.

Tacitus describes the Germans in general, their land, warfare, kings and assemblies, religion, marriage customs and love of drinking and gambling, in the essay's first half.

The essay surveys the individual tribes from the Rhine to the Baltic in its second half, naming and locating peoples whose own accounts of themselves do not survive.

Siegfried, killer of a dragon and owner of the Nibelung treasure, comes to Worms to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian king Gunther, and helps Gunther by trickery to win the Icelandic queen Brünhild, a deception that will eventually prove fatal.

A quarrel between the two queens exposes the deceit by which Brünhild was won, and Gunther's vassal Hagen murders Siegfried and sinks the treasure in the Rhine, converting Kriemhild's husband's death and the lost treasure into a permanent grievance.

Froissart describes the English longbowmen at Crécy cutting down wave after wave of mounted French knights, a battle that shattered French confidence in the traditional cavalry charge and marked, though Froissart does not frame it this way explicitly, a genuine turning point in how European warfare would be conducted.

Froissart recounts how six leading burghers of Calais, dressed in sackcloth with ropes around their necks, offered their own lives to Edward III in exchange for sparing their starved, besieged city, a gesture of chivalric self-sacrifice Froissart presents as the war's most morally exemplary single episode.

Arthur draws the sword from the stone, proving his right to the throne, and subsequently founds the Round Table, establishing the fellowship of knights whose adventures, alliances and eventual internal betrayals will structure the entire remainder of the narrative.

Galahad alone achieves the quest of the Holy Grail, his exceptional purity succeeding where Lancelot's otherwise considerable chivalric excellence cannot, a pointed distinction between worldly knightly virtue and the specifically spiritual worthiness the Grail quest actually requires.

The document recounts the creation of the world, the descent of all peoples from Adam and Eve, and the establishment of the papacy, before declaring that the pope, as God's vicar on earth, donated the islands and mainland of the ocean sea to the Spanish crown.

The hearers are required to acknowledge the Church as ruler and superior of the whole world, to acknowledge the king and queen of Castile as lords of these lands by virtue of the papal donation, and to permit religious instruction to be given to them, and are told that if they do so promptly, they will be received in love and charity.

The Indians were the true owners of their lands and goods before the Spaniards came, in public and in private, and neither their unbelief nor their sins nor any supposed want of reason deprived them of dominion.

Neither the emperor nor the pope is lord of the whole world, discovery gives no title to lands already possessed, and refusal of the faith or the sins of the natives are no just cause of war.

Paré discovers that boiling oil in gunshot wounds did more harm than a simple dressing, a finding that emerged from a specific practical emergency, running out of oil during battle, rather than from theoretical medical argument alone.

Paré finds that ligating arteries after amputation beat cauterising them, replacing a brutal, painful standard technique with a more humane and effective alternative grounded in accumulated clinical observation across decades of military surgical service.

A Chorus asks the audience to imagine the armies the stage cannot hold, making theatrical limitation itself an explicit theme, Shakespeare drawing attention to performance's own constructed nature rather than concealing it behind conventional dramatic illusion.

Henry exposes three traitors, takes Harfleur, hangs his old companion Bardolph for looting, and walks in disguise among his soldiers the night before Agincourt, demonstrating the reformed prince's complete transformation into disciplined wartime king.

In the seventh year of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Troilus loves Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks, and her uncle Pandarus brings them together, staging romance within a war already grinding well past its initial heroic excitement.

The next morning Cressida is traded to the Greek camp for a prisoner, and Troilus watches from hiding as she gives herself to the Greek Diomedes, staging betrayal witnessed rather than merely reported and forcing the audience to share his devastating position.

The account describes the attack on Nombre de Dios, where Drake was wounded, an early and costly raid on Spanish colonial territory that nonetheless established the pattern of daring assault on Spain's American possessions Drake would pursue throughout his career.

Drake allies with the Cimaroons, escaped African slaves who guided him across the isthmus of Panama, a genuine partnership against shared Spanish colonial power that complicates any simple reading of this voyage as purely English enterprise.

Andromache, Hector's widow, is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who loves her and will spare her son Astyanax only if she marries him, weaponizing his considerable political power over a captive woman into coercive romantic leverage.

Andromache agrees to marry Pyrrhus intending to kill herself afterwards, staging maternal duty and personal integrity in irreconcilable tension, accepting a repugnant marriage purely to save her son while privately refusing to actually survive the compromise.

Major von Tellheim, discharged from military service and under suspicion of dishonesty despite his actual innocence, has broken off his engagement to Minna von Barnhelm specifically because he refuses to bring a ruined name into marriage, treating his compromised reputation as a genuine barrier rather than something love alone could overcome.

Minna arrives in Berlin searching for Tellheim, and when direct argument fails to move him from his stubborn position, she tricks him by pretending she too has been disinherited, restoring symmetry to their circumstances so that his own sense of honor now obliges him to marry her rather than continuing to refuse.

Washington announces that he will not be a candidate for a third term, and urges the union of the states above every sectional loyalty, since the name of American belongs to them all in common.

He warns against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, which serves to distract the public councils, agitate the community with ill-founded jealousies, and open the door to foreign influence and corruption.

Hermann, the prosperous innkeeper's son, brings a cart loaded with clothing and provisions out to the refugees passing through the town, and among them notices Dorothea, a young woman managing and caring for the displaced families around her with a competence and dignity that immediately strikes him.

Hermann's father makes clear he wants a richer match for his son than a penniless refugee could provide, prompting Hermann's mother, more sympathetic to her son's actual feelings, to send the pastor and the apothecary out among the refugees to make careful, discreet inquiries into Dorothea's actual character and background.

The declaration renounces France forever, swearing that the new nation will never again submit to French governance, and recalls in unsparing detail the specific cruelties both of slavery under colonial rule and of the recent war fought to end it.

Dessalines and the assembled generals swear to die rather than ever again live under French domination, a collective oath binding the nation's new leadership to permanent, unconditional resistance against any future attempt at French reconquest.

I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one, / Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, / The age discovers he is not the true one.

Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, / 'Tis woman's whole existence.

War is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means, and this fundamental relationship, Clausewitz insists, must never be lost from view no matter how the specific character or scale of a war might vary.

War is more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case, since in its objective nature it is a fascinating trinity, composed of primordial violence, hatred and enmity, the play of chance and probability, and its element of subordination as an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone.

Fabrizio del Dongo, a young Lombard aristocrat, runs off to fight for Napoleon and wanders lost across the field of Waterloo without understanding what he sees, deflating epic military legend through a naive young participant's confused, fragmentary experience.

His aunt Gina, the Duchess Sanseverina, and her lover Count Mosca, the prime minister of Parma, manoeuvre to advance Fabrizio in the Church, demonstrating how personal advancement depends on calculated intrigue rather than genuine merit or vocation.

Tocqueville takes French domination as settled and asks how it can be made to last, examining the country's tribes and towns, the Arab and Kabyle populations, and the conduct of the war against Abd al-Qadir.

He argues for European settlement and for giving the colonists civil liberties, and criticises the brutality and lawlessness of French military rule as damaging to France itself.

The British expel the French settlers of Acadia in Nova Scotia in 1755, separating Evangeline from her betrothed Gabriel on their own wedding day, the poem's founding catastrophe that launches her years-long search across the American landscape.

Evangeline searches for Gabriel across Louisiana, the western prairies and the Ozarks, arriving again and again just after he has already moved on, a repeated pattern of near-miss that becomes the poem's central emotional structure across her years of devoted searching.

In the Peoria speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln argues that popular sovereignty, letting each territory vote on slavery's extension, cannot be reconciled with the Declaration's founding promise of equality, building his case through sustained constitutional and historical argument.

In the House Divided speech and the subsequent debates with Douglas, Lincoln argues that the nation cannot endure permanently half slave and half free, testing his constitutional and moral argument directly against Douglas's considerably more comfortable position favoring popular sovereignty.

Lincoln observes that both sides in the war read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, each invoking His aid against the other, refusing to let Northern listeners hear the war's outcome as simple divine vindication of one side's righteousness over the other's wickedness.

Lincoln names slavery directly as the war's actual cause, stating plainly what political caution had kept him from saying so directly for years, and suggests that God may be exacting from the whole nation, North and South together, payment for the wealth piled up by two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.

Billy Budd, a handsome and innocent young sailor pressed from a merchant ship onto the warship Bellipotent, becomes the object of master-at-arms John Claggart's unexplained hatred, a mystery the narrative never resolves into any specific comprehensible grievance or motive.

Claggart falsely accuses Billy of plotting mutiny before Captain Vere, and Billy, who stammers when agitated, cannot answer the accusation verbally and instead strikes Claggart dead with a single blow, his own physical limitation directly producing the fatal act.

The narrator, walking home through a ploughed field, finds a thistle crushed by the plough but still standing, and remembers a story from the Caucasus long ago, of a man who would not surrender.

Hadji Murat, a famous Avar commander, quarrels with the imam Shamil and defects to the Russians, hoping they will help him rescue his family, whom Shamil holds hostage; the Russians treat him as a curiosity and a bargaining chip.

The Prussian captain, cold, aristocratic and unmarried, becomes fixated on his young orderly's easy physical vitality, a quality he cannot bear precisely because he cannot possess or become it himself, and begins tormenting the young man with kicks and accumulated small cruelties.

On a march in oppressive heat, the orderly, half out of his mind from prolonged endurance of the captain's cruelty, suddenly breaks his tormentor's neck in a wood, an eruption of violence that arrives not as calculated retaliation but as a delirious, almost involuntary act.

Freud argues that we need not be greatly surprised that civilized nations should, under the pressure of war, reveal themselves capable of such cruelty and disregard for law, since civilization has never actually destroyed the primitive, aggressive impulses inherited from an earlier stage of human development, only overlaid and restrained them.

He observes that in our unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality, and that ordinary life proceeds as though this were straightforwardly true, death acknowledged abstractly as a fact but genuinely excluded from how we actually anticipate and plan our own futures.

Du Bois writes that he knows the souls of white people as they were and are, seeing them from behind a veil they themselves cannot see through, and that this vantage point lets him name what whiteness actually is, a very modern thing rather than any ancient or natural category.

He argues that the idea of personal whiteness was invented only yesterday, essentially coinciding with modern European colonial expansion, rather than representing any unchanging fact of human nature or any ancient, deeply rooted category of human difference.

Brigadier General Ezra Mannon returns to his wife Christine, who has taken his cousin Adam Brant as a lover, and she poisons him, transposing the opening murder of Aeschylus's Oresteia into a New England setting at the Civil War's end.

Their daughter Lavinia, who loves her father and hates her mother, drives her brother Orin to kill Brant, adapting Electra's role into specifically psychological terms, family violence now explained through repressed desire rather than divine compulsion.

Civilisations, not nations, are the intelligible units of historical study, and Toynbee identifies some twenty-one of them, from the Egyptian and Sumerian to the Western, as the field of comparison.

Civilisations arise through creative responses to challenges, neither too easy nor too severe, and grow through the leadership of creative minorities whom the masses follow by mimesis.

War is just like love, it always finds a way. Why should it end?

Whoever wants to survive should not resist evil. Whoever wants to survive should keep quiet.

The unification of the world under Western technology and the atomic bomb have put Western civilisation itself on trial, and the historian's task is to ask whether it will meet the test that earlier civilisations failed.

Civilisations die by suicide rather than murder: the failure comes from within, when a creative minority ceases to create and becomes merely dominant, and the masses withdraw their allegiance.

Broken spears lie in the roads; we have torn our hair in our grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red with blood.

They ate everything, including hens, eggs, maize cakes, and they even mounted the horses and treated them like men, or like gods, and gave the animals food to eat, as if the animals understood their speech.

Fanon argues that colonialism is not a thinking machine or a body endowed with reasoning faculties, but violence in its natural state, and concludes that it will only yield when confronted with greater violence, a claim he presents as description of colonialism's actual structure rather than as abstract moral endorsement of force.

He warns that the national bourgeoisie which inherits a newly independent state will, in country after country, simply step into the colonizer's vacated economic and administrative position rather than genuinely transforming the structures of exploitation that position depended on, betraying the actual substance of the independence it claims to represent.