If there is a God, the phrase that must disgust him is - holy war.

I would no more teach children military training than teach them arson, robbery, or assassination.

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.

When you join the Parachute Regiment they send you on training and initiation exercises. One of the tasks is to accept and care for a pet white rabbit. The young squaddie has to feed, brush, stroke and comfort his rabbit for a week, and become attached to it. Then he has to shoot it.

The aim of military training is not just to prepare men for battle, but to make them long for it.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice. They have experienced secretly and privately their natural human impulse towards sadism and brutality ... Not only did I learn to kill with a noose of piano wire put around someone's neck from behind, but I learned to enjoy the prospect of killing that way.

Seems nothing draws men together like killing other men.

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another.

Everything you do in a war is crime in peace.