Quotes About Rules Of War

“Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.”

— Naomi Klein

“Are we going to get out of here, do you think?" "Oh, they'll have to release us sooner or later. Prisoners of war, which is how they must be classifying us, have to be released at the end of hostilities. There are international rules. I was a prisoner of war before, nearly forty years ago.”

— Lucy Beckett

“So much simpler, to kill for gold. It did not matter what anyone thought about that. The only rules he abided were those of the Old One, and she cared nothing for war beyond forcing mortals to consider the price of it.”

— F.T. McKinstry

“We wouldn't even have wars, if adults followed the rules they learned as children. A four-year old would be able to see how foolish grown men are behaving if you explained the war in child's terms. A boy named Germany started causing problems all over the playground that included beating up a girl named Belgium on his way to hurt a kid named France. Then England tried to beat up Germany to help France and Belgium, and when that didn't work, they called over a kid named America, and people started pounding on him, too.”

— Cat Winters

“Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.”

— Otto Von Bismarck

“Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.”

— Joe Abercrombie

“War has its necessities ... and I have always understood that. Always known the cost. But, this day, by my own hand, I have realized something else. War is not a natural state. It is an imposition, and a damned unhealthy one. With its rules, we willingly yield our humanity. Speak not of just causes, worthy goals. We are takers of life.”

— Steven Erikson

“Love and war, it seemed, worked by the same rules. One had to hurry, before the fires flared out.”

— Robin Oliveira

“(He) was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to a mercenary.”

— Amitav Ghosh

“You have to remember, Kanai, she said at length, that as a young man Nirmal was in love with the idea of revolution. Men like that, even when they turn their backs on their party and their comrades, can never let go of the idea: it's the secret god that rules their hearts. It is what makes them come alive; they revel in the danger, the exquisite pain. It is to them what childbirth is to a woman, or war to mercenary.”

— Amitav Ghosh

“The great commander can certainly move fast and strike like lightning, but his art of war consists first and foremost in moderation, measured geometric order, carefully weighed-up knowledge of circumstances and rules, a tranquil 'thinking things over'; without this there is little use in being acquainted with that 'infinity of situations' in which a soldier finds himself.”

— Claudio Magris

“They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor.”

— Hilary Mantel

“This wasn't how they talked. They threw things at each other. Insults, jokes, sometimes even remotes. They made war and made peace and made up and made out. They didn't do things like set ground rules. They didn't do feelings talk. They didn't get it out in the open.”

— Kami Garcia

“When war makes commerce and commerce is law, profit rules prudence and justice is flawed.”

— Christopher Moore

“I believe - I daily find it proved - that we can get nothing in this world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a conviction, except out of purifying flame, or through strengthening peril. We err; we fall; we are humbled - then we walk more carefully. We greedily eat and drink poison out of the gilded cup of vice, or from the beggar's wallet of avarice; we are sickened, degraded; everything good in us rebels against us; our souls rise bitterly indignant against our bodies; there is a period of civil war; if the soul has strength, it conquers and rules thereafter.”

— Charlotte Brontë

“The Imperial forces must keep their hands off, but they find that they can do much even so. Each sector is encouraged to be suspicious of its neighbors. Within each sector, economic and social classes are encouraged to wage a kind of war with each other. The result is that all over Trantor it is impossible for the people to take united action. Everywhere, the people would rather fight each other than make a common stand against the central tyranny and the Empire rules without having to exert force.”

— Isaac Asimov

“I will not attempt to deny the reasonableness and necessity of a party war; but in carrying on that war all principles and rules of justice should not be departed from.”

— Robert Walpole

“The middle of 'America's Women' is about the Civil War, and how women, black and white, confronted slavery and abolition. As in every other period of crisis, the rules of sexual decorum were suspended due to emergency.”

— Gail Collins

“There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.”

— Leon Trotsky

“Naasir was strong and fast and highly intelligent, but he was currently trapped in the heart of enemy territory, and that enemy did not fight according to any known rules of war.”

— Nalini Singh

“The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you.”

— Brad Thor

“The Security Council represents the situation from 1945 - you had the Allies who won the war who occupied that. The defeated guys - the Germans and Japan - were out. The occupied countries had no voice. That was fine in '45, but today, Germany rules Europe, frankly. They are driving Europe but have no voice.”

— Mo Ibrahim

“The rules of war for federal court were contained in the 86 rules of federal civil procedure, the rules of the local federal court, and the courtroom rules of the particular federal judge.”

— Kenneth Eade

“Should a professor of accounting or chemistry be fired for using up class time to sound off about homelessness or the war in Iraq? Yes! There is no high moral principle that prevents it. What prevents it are tenure rules that have saddled so many colleges with so many self-indulgent prima donnas who seem to think that they are philosopher kings, when in fact they are often grossly ignorant or misinformed outside the narrow confines of their particular specialty.”

— Thomas Sowell

“If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail.”

— Ulysses S. Grant

“His cause in the mid-1980s was solving the systemic problems in DOD that he believed to be responsible for the catastrophic handling of the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983. The hearings he called for, and parallel ones in the House, revealed a riot of military disorganization that rivaled that of the Crimean War: an unclear chain of command; almost nonexistent communications between the military services; vague rules of engagement; and poor coordination, even in the timely evacuation of the wounded. Goldwater and Nichols, both veterans with a deep understanding of the military, took the lead on investigating these debacles.”

— Anonymous.

“Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war-that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It's all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's”

— Leo Tolstoy

“Modern war is fought by a number of strong, sweaty horsemen with constipation, who have their eyes on power, on wealth and on glory, and who obey the rules just when it pleases them.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

“Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.”

— Adolf Eichmann

“Dan: We're looking at World War Three within the WEEK! I mean, what do we DO? The stakes are so high and humanity is so close to the edge ...
Rorschach: Some of us have always lived on edge, Daniel. It is possible to survive there if you observe rules: Just hang on by fingernails ... and never look down.”

— Alan Moore

“Why are you not smarter? It's only the rich who can't afford to be smart. They're compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can't leave. But you two. We three. We're free.”

— Michael Ondaatje

“A precursor to the Social Darwinists, Hobbes argued from th premise that the primordial human condition was a war fought by each against each, so brutal and incesssant that it was impossible to develop industry or even agriculture or the arts while that condition persisted. It's this description that culmintes in his famous epithet "And the life of man, solitary, poor, brutish, and short." It was a fiction to which he brought to bear another fiction, that of the social contract by which men agree to submit to rules and a presiding authority, surrendering their right to ravage each other for the sake of their own safety. The contract was not a bond of affection or identification, bot a culture or religion binding togetehr a civilization, only a convenience. Men, in his view, as in that of many other European writers of the period, are stark, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategy and not by nature ...”

— Rebecca Solnit

“It became the middle finger I couldn't raise in PR photographs. The mustache became my silent last word in the verbal battles I was losing with higher headquarters on rules, targets, and fighting the war.”

— Robin Olds

“In war, as in politics, no evil - even if it is permissible under the rules - is excusable unless it is absolutely necessary. Everything beyond that is a crime.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“I am saying that an Igbo man should be president in 2015. It matters where the president comes from, because all segment of the society had been president. People continue letting Ndigbo down because they think we were defeated during the war, which is not true. And until an Igbo man rules this country, the country will not move anywhere,”

— Orji Uzor Kalu

“I think that women as a group are so powerful. I still don't think we are able to embrace our power well enough yet. We think we live in a man's world and we have to follow their rules, and yet, we're so different, and our rules are so different. I wish that we could come together more as a political force. If women ran the world, I don't believe that there would be war. I really don't ... We understand the bigger picture. We understand our impact on the environment, on the world. We understand the generations that will go after us because we gave birth to them.”

— Kyra Sedgwick

“There is a big difference between fighting the cold war and fighting radical Islam. The rules have changed and we haven't.”

— John Le Carre

“War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.”

— John Steinbeck

“George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an advisor to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person commission investigating rules of war violation in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a Lifetime Achievement Award.”

— Tina Fey

“The United States of course wants to follow the highest standards of conduct with regard to enemy combatants who follow the rules of war. It should and does follow the Geneva Conventions scrupulously when fighting the armed forces of other nations that have signed the Geneva Conventions or follow their principles.”

— John Yoo

“Setting out rules for waging war (the Geneva Convention).”

— Paulo Coelho

“If men make war in slavish observance of rules, they will fail. No rules will apply to conditions of war as different as those which exist in Europe and America ... War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.”

— Ulysses S. Grant

“"You, who are on the road, must have a code that you can live by-"* You'll find universal agreement on the value of a behavior code, on the need for some sort of ethical system. Even the crooks count on "honor among thieves," and countries actually wage war according to certain rules. On the job and in the rest of our day-to-day living, we each need a "code for the road."”

— Price Pritchett

“You can take a pile of rocks and use them to build a house, or you can take the same pile and start a war. Tell children not to throw rocks, make rules against picking up rocks, and then make them mad. Keep projecting what not to do and you make the thought in their brains of what can and will be done.”

— Charles Manson