“He who cannot look over a battlefield with a dry eye, causes the death of many men uselessly.”

Songmaster (1979)

1960s, Farewell address (1961)
Context: During the long lane of the history yet to be written, America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Source: Violence and the Labor Movement (1914), p. 90
Context: The world cannot utterly ignore men who lay down their lives for any cause. Men may write and agitate, they may scream never so shrilly about the wrongs of the world, but when they go forth to fight single-handed and to die for what they preach, they have at least earned the right to demand of society an inquiry.

"Who says words with my mouth?" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
The Essential Rumi (1995)
Context: Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

Said on a television show, cited in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004. ISBN 0-345-45282-8, ch. 1, p. 22 https://books.google.it/books?id=RbxeFLpNnxUC&pg=PA22.

Space Song, Depression Cherry (August 28, 2015).

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Blood Meridian (1985)

[...] They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song.
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 17 (p. 139)