“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
Blood Meridian (1985)
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Cormac McCarthy 270
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933Related quotes
1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)
Interviewed in the documentary series The Civil War, 1990
“Some war hero is always getting in my way.”
Attributed to Stevenson by Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette and entered by William Fulbright in the Congressional Record for July 22, 1965. According to Ashmore, Stevenson said this when he was blocked by a motorcade for Charles de Gaulle
"The Ballad of the Girlie Man" http://www.milkmag.org/CHBERNSTEIN6.html, Milk Magazine, no. 6, 2005. Anthologized in Girlie Man (2006), ISBN 0226044068.
Notes on the Next War (1935)
Context: Hit in the head you will die quickly and cleanly even sweetly and fittingly except for the white blinding flash that never stops, unless perhaps it is only the frontal bone or your optic nerve that is smashed, or your jaw carried away, or your nose and cheek bones gone so you can still think but you have no face to talk with. But if you are not hit in the head you will be hit in the chest, and choke in it, or in the lower belly, and feel it all slip and slide loosely as you open, to spill out when you try to get up, it's not supposed to be so painful but they always scream with it, it's the idea I suppose, or have the flash, the slamming clang of high explosive on a hard road and find your legs are gone above the knee, or maybe just a foot gone and watch the white bone sticking through your puttee, or watch them take a boot off with your foot a mush inside it, or feel an arm flop and learn how a bone feels grating, or you will burn, choke and vomit, or be blown to hell a dozen ways, without sweetness or fittingness: but none of this means anything. No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
“Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.”
This is almost always attributed to US Ambassador Francis Meehan http://www.nndb.com/people/060/000121694/, though without citations, and only very rarely to Patton.
Misattributed
“War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”
The judge
Blood Meridian (1985)
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
