15 Lois McMaster Bujold Quotes on War

Lois McMaster Bujold quotes on war

18. Live, and so confound our enemies.

21. She didn't feel anything, no grief or remorse, though her heart was racing and her breath came in gasps. A shocky combat-high, that immortal rush that made men charge machine guns. So this was what the war-addicts came for.

36. The loonies who sought a glorious death in battle found it very early on. This rapidly cleared the chain of command of the accumulated fools. The survivors were those who learned to fight dirty, and live, and fight another day, and win, and win, and win, and for whom nothing, not comfort, or security, not family for friends for their immortal souls, was more important than winning. Dead men are losers by definition. Survival and victory. They weren't supermen, or immune to pain. They sweated in confusion and darkness. And ... they won.

49. 'You must kill if you expect to survive.'

53. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.

65. A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.

85. There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else.

104. Aren't family squabbles jolly fun? Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.

106. If it ever came down to exerting power by force, it would mean I'd already lost it.

108. Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long they stand around chatting before they shoot you.

113. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present--they are real.

123. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

129. War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

136. I guess it just doesn't look very heroic to sneak up behind somebody and shoot them in the back. I can't help thinking it would be more efficient, though.

138. Organization seemed to be the key. To get huge masses of properly matched men and materials to the right place at the right time in the right order with the swiftness required to even grasp survival--to wrestle an infinitely complex and confusing reality into the abstract shape of victory--organization, it seemed, might even outrank courage as a soldierly virtue.