What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine - they are not wounds and blood and fever, spotted and low, or dysentery, chronic and acute, cold and heat and famine - they are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization and disorder on the part of the inferior, jealousies, meanness, indifference, selfish brutality on the part of the superior.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- The true horror of war is not physical wounds but the moral degradation and brutality inflicted by all ranks of soldiers.
- In plain terms
- War's worst horror is moral brutality not physical wounds.
- What can you take from it?
- War degrades humanity beyond physical injury.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What is the true cost of war?
- How does war change people?
Another view
It focuses on moral aspects over physical trauma.
More from Florence Nightingale
You must go to Mahometanism, to Buddhism, to the East, to the Sufis & Fakirs, to Pantheism, for the right growth of mysticism.
Permalink to quote #2 Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great o…
Permalink to quote #4 Can the 'word' be pinned down to either one period or one church? All churches are, of course, only more or less unsuccessful attempts to represent the unseen …
Permalink to quote #1
Related quotes
I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass...they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips.
Franz StanglFranz Stangl quote #2 There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable.
Howard ZinnHoward Zinn quote #3 As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. …
George OrwellGeorge Orwell quote #10