A Soldier Quotes

That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.
- Joe Abercrombie

There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier.
- Diana Abu Jaber

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?...If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!
- J R R Tolkien

I took my orders, too. But if i couldn't keep you alive, I thought I could at least keep you together. In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he's praying in a foxhole.
- Mitch Albom

You said he was a soldier. You don't suppose...?"
"Oh, Gods." Ignata blinked. "You think something could be wrong down there?"
All of them looked at William, who chose this precise moment to slide the wet shirt back on his back, which required him to flex, raising his arms.
"That would be a shame," Cerise murmured.
- Ilona Andrews

Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
- Thomas Jefferson

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.
- Thomas Jefferson

I didn't know that, you take your coffee seriously, dont you?'
'Every morning, I run to the coffeemaker like a soldier returning to a lost love after the war.
- Lisa Kleypas

You're going to go living. Because living is the challenge, Josie. Dying is so easy. Sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. But living? That can take eighty years and you do something in that time, whether it's giving birth to a baby or being a housewife or a barrister or a soldier. You've accomplished something. To throw that away at such a young age, to have no hope, is the biggest tragedy.
- Melina Marchetta

The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Courage is not walking into battle with no fear - you should know this as a soldier. Courage is feeling great fear, but walking forward anyway.
Lady Lavender by Lynna Banning
- Lynna Banning

What makes the strength of a soldier isn't the energy he uses trying to intimidate his opponent by sending him a load of signals, it's the strength he's able to concentrate within himself, by staying centred.
- Muriel Barbery

I'm not Sisyphus trying to restrain death. Illyria is a soldier. If it's her time, it's her time. I'm not at war with Atropos. It's her will to take us whenever she likes. My only goal is to die with dignity. (Stryker)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

You really don't care for torture, do you? (Medea)
No, I don't. It's one thing to strike out in anger, another to cause agony for the hell of it. I'm a soldier, not a coward. (Stryker)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

I might not like the fact that you are my commander, Greek, but as a soldier I will obey you regardless of my personal distaste for your company. (Valerius)
Gee, T-Red, doesn't it make you all warm and fuzzy just to be near him? (Talon)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?
- Clara Barton

This conflict is one thing I've been waiting for. I'm well and strong and young - young enough to go to the front. If I can't be a soldier, I'll help soldiers.
- Clara Barton

Vanity is so firmly anchored in man's heart that a soldier, a camp follower, a cook or a porter will boast and expect admirers, and even philosophers want them; those who write against them want to enjoy the prestige of having written well, those who read them want the prestige of having read them, and perhaps I who write this want the same thing.
- Blaise Pascal

When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a labourer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.
- Blaise Pascal

You are not a man anymore. You are a soldier. Your comfort is of no importance and your life isn't of much importance. Most of your orders will be unpleasant, but that's not your business.They should've trained you for this, and not for flower-strewn streets. They should have built your soul with truth, not led along with lies.
- John Steinbeck

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, Use it well, use it wisely.
- John Steinbeck

I somewhere along the way became fascinated with exploring characters who are willing to put themselves into violent situations, whether it's football, hockey, boxing, being a cop, being a soldier. There's not a lot of people who are willing to put themselves into those situations.
- Peter Berg

I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream.
- Haruki Murakami

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
- Otto Von Bismarck

Philip Sharpe was a soldier in God's army," says the minister. "Now he marches with the angels.
- Holly Black

My whole career has been fulfilling my childhood fantasies, playing characters that are larger than life, getting to play a knight, an elf, a prince, and a soldier.
- Orlando Bloom

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
- Samuel Johnson

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

The library was home away from home to my mom, and my family. We had spent every Sunday afternoon there since I was a little boy, wandering around the stacks, pulling out every book with a picture of a pirate ship, a knight, a soldier, or an astronaut. My mom used to say, This is my church, Ethan. This is how we keep the Sabbath holy in our family.
- Kami Garcia

Yelling a battle crymore to motivate himself than frighten his foesLukel
grabbed the table leg and swung it at a soldier. The wood bounced off the man's
helmet, but the blow was powerful enough to daze him, so Lukel followed it with a solid blow to the face. The soldier dropped and Lukel grabbed his weapon.
Now he had a sword. He only wished he knew how to use it.
- Brandon Sanderson

According to Robert, his friend Moses was a soldier in the first war, as he described it. He fought Indians and soldiers in red coats. -from "Lizzie After the War" www.nancybbrewer.com-Amazon/kindle and Nook
- Nancy B Brewer

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.
- Mel Brooks

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
- Rudyard Kipling

I don't duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.
- Lois Mcmaster Bujold

there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.
- Charles Bukowski

The sensors have many potential practical uses - in Government buildings, train carriages, cargo containers, on a soldier's lapel - and are a thousand times cheaper than current sensors that are used for the same purpose.
- Anne Campbell

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being a soldier, fighting for this country, is neither Republican nor Democrat.
- Max Cleland

In the final choice a soldier's pack is not so heavy as a prisoner's chains.
- Dwight D Eisenhower

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
- Dwight D Eisenhower

She looked into Kirsten's eyes and wondered how it is that a soldier fights and a savior suffers, but a woman, in lying down, rules everything.
- Rebecca Coleman

The boys stood before him in a square, at attention. Hutchinson, Merryweather and the other Captains stood at the front, their OTC uniforms neatly pressed and clean. The outfits were a light tan. Nobody would mistake them for the real thing, but they did give the lads a soldierly air. 'All present and correct, Captain Merryweather?' he asked.
- Paul Cornell

She was as faithful as a morning mist, as hard as a sword-bayonet, and that, he thought, made her a suitable reward for a soldier.
- Bernard Cornwell

I appeal to you as a soldier to spare me the humiliation of seeing my regiment march to meet the enemy and I not share its dangers.
- George Armstrong Custer

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth.
- Kurt Vonnegut

He didn't look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don't notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly."
"I want to be a soldier. A hero."
"You'll grow out of it.
- Steven Erikson

To be a soldier one needs that special gene, that extra something, that enables a person to jump into one on one combat, something, after all, that is unimaginable to most of us, as we are simply not brave enough.
- Rupert Everett

I am not a woman who would be practical in your life, Sam. You need a home and family..."
"I'm a soldier, Azami. That's who I am. What I am. My woman will be my home----my family..
- Christine Feehan

Damn it all, it's the first duty of a soldier - it's the first duty of all Englishmen - to be able to tell a good lie in answer to a charge.
- Ford Madox Ford

You were a soldier?"
"Yes, sir."
"You barely look old enough to have seen the last battle."
"My father was a career army man, sir. I was there at the first engagement with Analousia, and took up my father's rifle when I was barely fifteen."
"Saints preserve us," Dr. Kelling said, and squeezed Galen's shoulder. "What have we done to our youth?
- Jessica Day George

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
- Edward Gibbon

What is the death of a soldier even off duty of an occupying army walking in an occupied territory against the death of a little boy screaming in terror in his father's arms Where is the equivalence
- Linda Grant

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.
- Ulysses S Grant

The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they're dying in vain right this very second. And you know what's worse than a soldier dying in vain? It's more soldiers dying in vain. That's what's worse.
- Mike Gravel

Just because I was almost 62, I did not feel decrepit and felt I wasn't finished being a soldier yet.
- Gerald Griffin

I try to be a good cop. I try to be a good little soldier and follow orders up to a point. But in the end I'm not really a cop, or a soldier. I am a legally sanctioned murderer. I am the Executioner.
- Laurell K Hamilton

I want to be a soldier as my father was.
- Kaspar Hauser

Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
(Something About a Soldier (1940))
- William Saroyan

There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
- William Saroyan

What are you doing?"
"Kneeling before a goddess."
"I'm not a goddess."
"You are. A goddess, a princess, a queen. As a soldier, I pledge myself to your service. As a prince, I grant you any boon within my power. As a man, I ask to sit at your feet and worship you. Ask me to do anything for you and I will do it.
- Colleen Houck

He wasn't that careful, Lucan. I think you've got him mixed up with someone else."

"He put a lot of effort into you. Not just as a soldier. But as a child. Why teach you that horse sport? Why teach you to play an instrument? Why give you a God? He took you to church? Every week?"

I swallow and nod as my face begins to feel hot.

"Men who want to kill their grandchildren don't do those things, Junco."

FLIGHT.
- J A Huss

One doesn't become a soldier in a week - it takes training, study and discipline. There is no question that the finest Army in the world is found in the United States.
- Daniel Inouye

When I joined Custer I donned the uniform of a soldier. It was a bit awkward at first but I soon got to be perfectly at home in men's clothes.
- Calamity Jane

The tags' chain stirs with the wind; and I sleep
Paid, dead, and a soldier. Who fights for his own life
Loses, loses: I have killed for my world, and am free.
- Randall Jarrell

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.
- June Jordan

Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.
- Susanna Kearsley

My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.
- Pablo Picasso

Here's the thing about baseball-it's not the individual sport I thought it was. Turns out I was wrong about that.
Yeah, the batter is a lone man against the world. He stands in the batter's box like a soldier and it's up to him-and him alone-what happens next.
But here's the thing I didn't understand until I was forced to, until recently: In order to hit a home run...
Someone else has to pitch the ball.
- Barry Lyga

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?
- Douglas Macarthur

I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don't wake up forever.
- Cormac Mccarthy

Do you know what a soldier is, young man? He's the chap who makes it possible for civilised folk to despise war.
- Allan Massie

A soldier's life revolves around his mail. Like many others, I've been able to follow my kid's progress from the day he was born until now he is able to walk and talk a little, and although I have never seen him I know him very well.
- Bill Mauldin

And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through this program.
- Jane Mayer

I don't imagine Heads of Government would ever be able to say I'm not an economist therefore I can't take decisions on matters of the economy; I'm not a soldier I can't take decisions on matters of defence; I'm not an educationist so I can't take decisions about education.
- Thabo Mbeki

a soldier lives always for the next battle, because he knows that before it arrives impossible changes can occur in his favor.
- James A Michener

I hit him more times than necessary but by then my actions were mostly chemical, like a soldier ant or a teenager in love.
- Walter Mosley

I'm a soldier in war, and the only difference between our war and the ones between humans is that this fight has been going on since time began and it's not likely to be over any time soon. - Will
- Courtney Allison Moulton

The function of a citizen and a soldier are inseparable.
- Benito Mussolini

The scene was not a happy one yet we looked upon it in the cold stoical spirit of a soldier; a slight chilling pang and then a return soul and body to the enemy before us.
- Knute Nelson

War can condition a person to be resilient, tolerant, dependable, strong, and capable of so much more than one who had experienced nothing of it; it can bring out the very best in us, but also the very worst. Where is it, I ask, the proper conduit through which a soldier should be raised from whence they would become an upstanding citizen of the world, instead of a single country?
- Mike Norton

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.
- Trevor Nunn

A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.
- Tim O Brien

...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier a good soldier ... [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.
- George S Patton

I am a Soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.
- George S Patton

Every lover is a soldier.
- Ovid

If I have got to be a soldier, I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable.
- Wilfred Owen

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.
- Lester B Pearson

No operational commander should have to assign a soldier a task that could be done as well by a computer, a remote sensor, or an unmanned airplane.
- Richard Perle

Every seaman is not only a navigator, but a merchant and also a soldier.
- William Petty

A soldier is a "Yahoo" hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.
- Jonathan Swift

I always played a soldier, sailor, or policemen.
- John Ratzenberger

I love him, his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace, to me, a soldier in big boots, belt, and a knapsack, taking the road that lies before him under the high heaven, quickly forgetting and seldom sorrowful, for ever pressing on under the wide night sky.
- Erich Maria Remarque

The courage of a soldier is heightened by his knowledge of his profession.
- Publius Flavius Vegetius

Tomorrow we will be nothing but earth and dust.
Who will remember the love a soldier once knew?
- Shan Sa

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers.
- Siegfried Sassoon

I could not have the honour of being a German soldier because of my imprisonment in the First World War. And in this world war the Fuehrer refuses to allow me to serve as a soldier.
- Fritz Sauckel

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that.
- Norman Schwarzkopf

It's hard for me to imagine that some people in the CIA who had firsthand knowledge would be unable to recognize that this would be helpful information for a soldier's death.
- Christopher Shays

When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.
- Paullina Simons

Tania...you and I had only one moment..."said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?"
(When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.)
"I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.
- Paullina Simons

Soldiers may be wounded in battle and sent to a hospital. A hospital isn't a shelf. It's a place of repair. And a soldier in the spiritual army is never off his battlefield. He is only removed to another part of the battlefield when a wound interrupts what he was meant to do, and sets him doing something else.
- Amy Wilson Carmichael

Abraham Lincoln, a predecessor of Barack Obama in both the White House and the Illinois state legislature, had eighteen months of formal education and became a soldier, surveyor, postmaster, rail-splitter, tavern keeper, and self-taught prairie lawyer. Obama went to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, and became a "community organizer." I'm not sure that's progress--and it's certainly not "sustainable.
- Mark Steyn

He deals the cards to find the answer
The sacred geometry of chance
The hidden law of a probable outcome
The numbers lead a dance
I know that the spades
Are the swords of a soldier
I know that the clubs are weapons of war
I know that diamonds
Mean money for this art
But that's not the shape of my heart
- Sting

And nobody has the right to judge a soldier from the warmth and safety of their armchair.
- Karen Traviss

And he likes to torment me, and laughs when I get upset when he does. No, of course not. I do not love Jack Elliot. He is low and coarse and a soldier, and not the kind of man I want to spend my life with.
- Nancy E Turner

Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadn't waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn't been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.
- Catherynne M Valente

When I did A Soldier's Story, I was very young and green and thought I knew everything-now I know I know everything!
- Denzel Washington

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.
- Mary Wesley

How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions.
- Tad Williams