HEKTOR, YOU ARE too intractable to listen to reason.
Because the god has granted you the actions of warfare
therefore you wish in counsel also to be wise beyond others.
But you cannot choose to have all gifts given to you together.
To one man the god has granted the actions of warfare,
to one to be a dancer, to another the lyre and singing,
and in the breast of another Zeus of the wide brows establishes wisdom...
—The Iliad of Homer
Book XIII, beginning at line 726
(words of Poulydamas to Hektor)
Translated by Richmond Lattimore
© 1951 by The University of Chicago Press, pp. 290-291
Inside every army is a crowd struggling to get out, and the strongest fear with which every commander lives — stronger than his fear of defeat or even of mutiny — is that of his army reverting to a crowd through some error of his making. For a crowd is the antithesis of an army, a human assembly animated not by discipline but by mood, by the play of inconstant and potentially infectious emotion which, if it spreads, is fatal to an army's subordination. Hence it is that the bitterest of military insults contain the accusations of crowdlike conduct — rabble, riff-raff, scum, canaille, Pöbel — and the deepest contempt soldiers can harbor is reserved for leaders whose armies dissolve between their fingers — Cadorna, Kerensky, Gough, Gamelin, Perceval.
—The Face of Battle
© 1976 by John Keegan
First Published by The Viking Press, 1976
Excerpt from Barnes and Noble Edition, pp. 173-74
THE CHIEF REASON warfare is still with us is neither a secret death wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. Was not Hobbes right when he said: "Covenants, without the sword, are but words"?
—On Violence
© 1969, 1970 by Hannah Arendt
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York
Excerpt from the paperback Harvest edition, p. 5