“He who cannot look over a battlefield with a dry eye, causes the death of many men uselessly.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
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.
“He who cannot look over a battlefield with a dry eye, causes the death of many men uselessly.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman
Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 26
“Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.”
China Miéville book The Scar
Source: The Scar
“Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.”
Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian
Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 31
Sri Aurobindo book Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol
Savitri (1918-1950), Book One : The Book Of Beginnings
“Funny how internal scars never healed. They were the souvenirs of the past.”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist
Source: Born of the Night
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses
Source: All the Pretty Horses
“The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
2 June 1824
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Source: Memoirs of the Second World War
“I stood in unimaginable trance
And agony that cannot be remembered.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
Remorse, Act iv, scene 3
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)