“I understand why some men become soldiers: to protect the nation and all that. But a whole race of people living to be soldiers seems … unhealthy.”

—  David Gemmell , book Legend

ibid
Drenai series, Legend, Pt 1: Against the Horde

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I understand why some men become soldiers: to protect the nation and all that. But a whole race of people living to be …" by David Gemmell?
David Gemmell photo
David Gemmell 195
British author of heroic fantasy 1948–2006

Related quotes

Bill Whittle photo

“And why do soldiers wear uniforms? It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldier’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

SANCTUARY (part 1) https://web.archive.org/web/20050521031500/http://ejectejecteject.com/archives/000125.html (18 May 2005)
2000s

Glen Cook photo

“Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 60 (p. 212; repeated on p. 356)

Norman Mailer photo
Glen Cook photo
Glen Cook photo

“Soldiers live. He dies and not you, and you feel guilty, because you're glad he died, and not you. Soldiers live, and wonder why.”

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 99, “By the Military Cemetery: Missing Persons” (p. 664)
Context: “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” my darling whispered to me. “People go at the oddest times and from the oddest causes.”
“Soldiers live,” I muttered.
“You’re turning that into a mantra.”
“You feel guilty. You wonder why him and not me, then you’re glad it was him and not you, then you feel guilty. Soldiers live. And wonder why.”

Frances Wright photo

“Americans no longer argue on the propriety of making all men soldiers, in order that their nation may be an object of terror to the rest of the world. They understand that the happiness of a people is the only rational object of a government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.”

Frances Wright (1795–1852) American activist

Independence Day speech (1828)
Context: Americans no longer argue on the propriety of making all men soldiers, in order that their nation may be an object of terror to the rest of the world. They understand that the happiness of a people is the only rational object of a government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all. They have, farther, almost excluded war as a profession, and reduced it from a system of robbery to one of simple defence. In so doing, they ought also to have laid aside all show of military parade, and all ideas of military glory. If they have not done so, it is that their reform in this matter is yet imperfect, and their ideas respecting it are confused.

John Boyne photo

“Bruno: Why do you wear pajamas all day?
Shmuel: The soldiers. They took all our clothes away.
Bruno: My dad's a soldier, but not the sort that takes people's clothes away.”

John Boyne (1971) Irish novelist, author of children's and youth fiction

Source: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Elbert Hubbard photo

“And the worst part about making a soldier of a man is not that a soldier kills brown men or white men, but that the soldier loses his own soul.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 15.

Margaret Sanger photo

“Blacks, soldiers, and Jews are a menace to the race.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Unknown source. Often falsely cited as Birth Control Review, April 1933 http://lifedynamics.com/app/uploads/2015/09/1933-04-April.pdf, as in William D. Gairdner, The War Against the Family (1992), p. 464 https://books.google.com/books?id=vZsQ5d_43zEC&pg=PA464. No letters or articles by Sanger appear in that issue.
John George, in American Extremists: Militias, Supremacists, Klansmen, Communists & Others (1992), p. 415, describes this quote as "evidently concocted in the late 1980s".
Misattributed

Rand Paul photo

Related topics