War Drums Beat Quotes

Tell me my heart beats a war drum that my eyes are not just armies but my spine is a harpoon.

What is war?' I asked. Oh, it's a messy, stupid business,' he said, 'Two sides wave flags and beat drums and shoot one another dead. It always begins this way, making speeches, talking about rights, and all that sort of thing.' But what is it for? What do they get out of it?' I don't know,' he said. 'To tell you the truth, I don't think they know themselves.

The war drums pound out a beat like that of the human heart. The terrible, awful sound of living, that one first learns to love and tremble at when floating in the womb.

Shall they return to beating of great bells In wild train-loads? A few, a few, too few for drums and yells, May creep back, silent, to village wells, Up half-known roads.

What I Will by Suheir Hammad I will not dance to your war drum. I will not lend my soul nor my bones to your war drum. I will not dance to your beating. I know that beat. It is lifeless. I know intimately that skin you are hitting. It was alive once hunted stolen stretched. I will not dance to your drummed up war. I will not pop spin break for you. I will not hate for you or even hate you. I will not kill for you. Especially I will not die for you. I will not mourn the dead with murder nor suicide. I will not side with you nor dance to bombs because everyone else is dancing. Everyone can be wrong. Life is a right not collateral or casual. I will not forget where I come from. I will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved near and our chanting will be dancing. Our humming will be drumming. I will not be played. I will not lend my name nor my rhythm to your beat. I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death. Your war drum ain’t louder than this breath.

Song of myself With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons. Have you heard that it was good to gain the day? I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won. I beat and pound for the dead, I blow through my embouchures my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who have fail'd! And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea! And to those themselves who sank in the sea! And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes! And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves. I

No war really comes unexpectedly. The drums are beating long before a single shot is fired. ~ Margaret Case Harriman,

12.  If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. [This extremely concise expression is intelligibly paraphrased by Chia Lin: “even though we have constructed neither wall nor ditch.” Li Ch’uan says: “we puzzle him by strange and unusual dispositions;” and Tu Mu finally clinches the meaning by three illustrative anecdotes—one of Chu-ko Liang, who when occupying Yang-p’ing and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma I, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated. What Sun Tzu is advocating here, therefore, is nothing more nor less than the timely use of “bluff.”]

I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body. What we need is not the sound of horns rising to the sky, but the steady beat of the bass drum. When you march to a bass drum, your left foot touches the earth with each beat, and you can feel the drum in your body: boom and boom and boom and pity people pity people pity people.

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don’t need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it’s unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we’re built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We’ve never known anything else—hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn’t recognize their own slavery—they even liked being slaves.

She tried to live like an ordinary woman; but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways; but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man’s world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man’s drum.

The doctors are busy with the repulsive but beneficent work of amputation. You see the sharp, curved knife enter the healthy, white body, you see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a piercing cry and curses, you see the army surgeon fling the amputated arm into a corner, you see another wounded man, lying in a litter in the same apartment, shrink convulsively and groan as he gazes at the operation upon his comrade, not so much from physical pain as from the moral torture of anticipation. — You behold the frightful, soul-stirring scenes; you behold war, not from its conventional, beautiful, and brilliant side, with music and drum-beat, with fluttering flags and galloping generals, but you behold war in its real phase — in blood, in suffering, in death.

They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelations. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.

At the first sound of the drum, the revolutionary movement died down. The more active layers of the workers were mobilized. The revolutionary elements were thrown from the factories to the front. Severe penalties were imposed for striking. The workers’ press was swept away. Trade unions were strangled. Hundreds of thousands of women, boys, peasants, poured into the workshops. The war—combined with the wreck of the International—greatly disoriented the workers politically, and made it possible for the factory administration, then just lifting its head, to speak patriotically in the name of the factories, carrying with it a considerable part of the workers, and compelling the more bold and resolute to keep still and wait. The revolutionary ideas were barely kept glowing in small and hushed circles. In the factories in those days, nobody dared to call himself “Bolshevik” for fear, not only of arrest, but of a beating from the backward workers.

It lies in human nature that deep emotion cannot be prolonged indefinitely, either in the individual or in a people, a fact that is known to all military organizations. Therefore it requires an artificial stimulation, a constant “doping” of excitement; and this whipping up was to be performed by the intellectuals, the poets, the writers and the journalists, scrupulously or otherwise, honestly or as a matter of professional routine. They were to beat the drums of hatred and beat them they did, until the ears of the unprejudiced hummed and their hearts quaked. In Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, and in Belgium, they all obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

As it stands, a large number of firms in all advanced economies specialize in warfare as a business, and are thus reliant on perpetuating war to continue being in business. They live off government spending exclusively, and have their entire existence reliant on there being perpetual wars necessitating ever‐larger arms spending. In the United States, whose defense spending is almost equal to that of the rest of the planet combined, these industries have a vested interest in keeping the U.S. government involved in some form of military adventure or other. This, more than any strategic, cultural, ideological, or security operations, explains why the United States has been involved in so many conflicts in parts of the world that cannot possibly have any bearing on the life of the average American. Only with unsound money can these firms grow to such enormous magnitude that they can influence the press, academia, and think tanks to continuously beat the drums of more war.

After years of fighting, the war was a complete stalemate and would have ended almost immediately in a negotiated settlement (as had most other European conflicts) had not the U.S. declared war on Germany.   As soon as Wilson's re-election had been engineered through the "he kept us out of war" slogan, a complete reversal of propaganda was instituted. In those days before radio and television, public opinion was controlled almost exclusively by newspapers. Many of the major newspapers were controlled by the Federal Reserve crowd. Now they began beating the drums over the "inevitability of war." Arthur Ponsonby, a memebr of the British parliament, admitted in his book Falsehood In War Time (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., New York, 1928): "There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world's history." Propaganda concerning the war was heavily one-sided. Although after the war many historians admitted that one side was as guilty as the other in starting the war, Germany was pictured as a militaristic monster which wanted to rule the world. Remember, this picture was painted by Britain which had its soldiers in more countries around the world than all other nations put together. So-called "Prussian militarism" did exist, but it was no threat to conquer the world. Meanwhile, the sun never set on the British Empire! Actually, the Germans were proving to be tough business competitors in the world's markets and the British did not approve.

The defenders retreated, but in good order. A musket flamed and a ball shattered a marine’s collar bone, spinning him around. The soldiers screamed terrible battle-cries as they began their grim job of clearing the defenders off the parapet with quick professional close-quarter work. Gamble trod on a fallen ramrod and his boots crunched on burnt wadding. The French reached steps and began descending into the bastion. 'Bayonets!' Powell bellowed. 'I want bayonets!' 'Charge the bastards!' Gamble screamed, blinking another man's blood from his eyes. There was no drum to beat the order, but the marines and seamen surged forward. 'Tirez!' The French had been waiting, and their muskets jerked a handful of attackers backwards. Their officer, dressed in a patched brown coat, was horrified to see the savage looking men advance unperturbed by the musketry. His men were mostly conscripts and they had fired too high. Now they had only steel bayonets with which to defend themselves. 'Get in close, boys!' Powell ordered. 'A Shawnee Indian named Blue Jacket once told me that a naked woman stirs a man's blood, but a naked blade stirs his soul. So go in with the steel. Lunge! Recover! Stance!' 'Charge!' Gamble turned the order into a long, guttural yell of defiance. Those redcoats and seamen, with loaded weapons discharged them at the press of the defenders, and a man in the front rank went down with a dark hole in his forehead. Gamble saw the officer aim a pistol at him. A wounded Frenchman, half-crawling, tried to stab with his sabre-briquet, but Gamble kicked him in the head. He dashed forward, sword held low. The officer pulled the trigger, the weapon tugged the man's arm to his right, and the ball buzzed past Gamble's mangled ear as he jumped down into the gap made by the marines charge. A French corporal wearing a straw hat drove his bayonet at Gamble's belly, but he dodged to one side and rammed his bar-hilt into the man's dark eyes. 'Lunge! Recover! Stance!

Then she sang:   Dumbarton’s drums beat bonnie O, When they mind me of my dear Johnnie O! How happy am I When my soldier is by, While he kisses and blesses his Annie O! Tis a soldier alone can delight me O, For his graceful looks do invite me O! While guarded in his arms I’ll fear no war’s alarms, Neither danger nor death shall e’er fright me O!   My love is a handsome laddie O, Genteel, but ne’er foppish or gaudy O! Though commissions are dear, Yet I’ll buy him one this year, For he’ll serve no longer a cadie O! A soldier has honor and bravery O, Unacquainted with rogues and their knavery O! He minds no other thing But the ladies or the king, For every other care is but slavery O!   Then I’ll be the captain’s lady O! Farewell, all my friends and my daddy O! I’ll wait no more at home, But I’ll follow with the drum, And whene’er that beats I’ll be ready O! Dumbarton’s drums sound bonnie O! They are sprightly like my dear Johnnie O! How happy I shall be When on my soldier’s knee, And he kisses and blesses his Annie O!

I’d forgotten the taste of a woman, forgotten the smell of arousal beating through my senses, like a war drum begging for her to be debauched. I needed to feel her shatter around my tongue, to feel her milk my finger with orgasm, and hear her screams fracture inside my head.

When she tricked me out of my powers and left the scraps, it was still more than the others. And I decided to use it to tap into the minds of every Night Court citizen she'd captured, and anyone who might know the truth. I made a web between all of them, actively controlling their minds every second of every day, every decade, to forget about Velaris, to forget about Mor, and Amren, and Cassian, and Azriel. Amarantha wanted to know who was close to me- who to kill and torture. But my true court was here, ruling this city and the others. And I used the remainder of my powers to shield them all from sight and sound. I had only enough for one city, one place. I chose the one that had been hidden from history already. I chose, and now must live with the consequences of knowing there were more left outside who suffered. But for those here.... anyone flying or travelling near Velaris would see nothing but barren rock, and if they tried to walk through it, they'd find themselves suddenly deciding otherwise. Sea travel and merchant trading were halted- sailors became farmers, working the earth around Velaris instead. And because my powers were focused on shielding them all, Feyre, I had very little to use against Amarantha. So I decided that to keep her from asking questions about the people who mattered, I would be her whore.' He'd done all of that, had done such horrible things... done everything for his people, his friends. And the only piece of himself that he'd hidden and managed to keep her from tainting, destroying, even if it meant fifty years trapped in a cage of rock....'' Those wings now flared wide. How many knew about those wings outside of Velaris or the Illyrian war-camps? Or had he wiped all memory of them from Prythian long before Amarantha? Rhys released my chin. But as he lowered his hand, i gripped his wrist, feeling the solid strength. 'It's a shame,' I said, the words nearly gobbled up by the sound of the city music. 'That others in Prythian don't know. A shame that you let them think the worst.' He took a step back, his wings beating the air like mighty drums. 'As long as the people who matter most know the truth, I don't care about the rest. Get some sleep.' Then he shot into the sky, and was swallowed by the darkness between the stars.

His heart beat like a war drum. Mine marched along to the same haunted rhythm.

The buzzing flies and screaming survivors had long since replaced the beating war-drums. The killing field was now a tangled sprawl of corpses, human and faerie alike, interrupted only by the broken wings jutting toward the grey sky or the occasional bulk of a felled horse.

It is the feeling of unjust that leads men to seek freedom from their oppressor, in doing so they beat the drums of war. The oppressor devoid of any understanding of justice caves, pushing the oppressed further into injustice..it is an unending cycle...an ouroboros.

Not towards those who sing in memory, but towards those who in memory sound and resonate like a fanfare, vibrant, pulsating, sounding like a fanfare, sounding like a charge, eternal drum, and which will beat in French memories long after the regimental drums have ceased to beat at the front of the regiments.

some proclaim for peace even as they beat the drums of war. That they beat the drums with an insatiable greed for power over others, for land, for resources and riches in the name of their favored deity rarely strikes as wrong, or even ironic. It simply is.

Any resolution, no matter how imperfect or unjust, was welcomed by a civilized world sickened with guilt that it had looked away for so long. They happily accepted that peace—tenuous as it was—and ignored a most familiar sound. It was undeniable if they listened carefully, beating softly, steadily on the blood-soaked horizon…  War drums.

Buchanan infamously quipped: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.

As times got worse in 1929, these groups and the German public at large kept beating the same drum. “See what the November criminals, the Versailles Treaty, the Allies, the communists, and the Jews have done to Germany?” “Germans have lost everything.” “The people are begging in the streets. The people have no dignity. No honor.” “Hitler will restore Germany’s strength, honor, and dignity!” Just right there, you essentially have a synopsis of every speech made by Hitler and his minions from 1929 until they came to power in 1933.

As he and Beth hit the stairs, he called out to his brothers, “Thanks for having my back once again.” The group stopped and turned to face him. After a beat of silence, they formed a half circle around the foot of the grand staircase, each making a thick fist with his weapon hand. With a great whoop! of a war cry, they went down on their right knee and slammed their heavy knuckles into the mosaic floor. The sound was thunder and bass drums and bomb explosions, ricocheting outward, filling all the rooms of the mansion. Wrath stared at them, seeing their heads bent, their broad backs curled, their powerful arms planted. They had each gone to that meeting prepared to take a bullet for him, and that would ever be true. Behind Tohr’s smaller form, Lassiter, the fallen angel, stood with a straight spine, but he wasn’t cracking any jokes at this reaffirmation of allegiance. Instead, he was back to staring at the damn ceiling. Wrath glanced up at the mural of warriors silhouetted against a blue sky and could see nothing much of the pictures that he’d been told were there. Getting back with the program, he said in the Old Language, “No stronger allies, no greater friends, no better fighters of honor could a king behold than these assembled afore me, mine brothers, mine blood.” A rolling growl of ascent lifted as the warriors got to their feet again, and Wrath nodded to each one of them. He had no more words to offer as his throat had abruptly choked, but they didn’t seem to need anything else. They stared at him with respect and gratitude and purpose, and he accepted their enormous gifts with grave appreciation and resolve. This was the ages-old covenant between king and subjects, the pledges on both sides made with the heart and carried out by the sharp mind and the strong body. “God, I love you guys,” Beth said. There was a lot of deep laughter, and then Hollywood said, “You want us to stab the floor for you again? Fists are for kings, but the queen gets the daggers.” “I wouldn’t want you to take chips out of this beautiful floor. Thank you, though.” “Say the word and it’s nothing but rubble.” Beth laughed. “Be still, my heart.” The Brothers came over and kissed the Saturnine Ruby that rode on her finger, and as each paid his honor, she gave him a gentle stroke of the hair. Except for Zsadist, who she smiled tenderly at. “Excuse us, boys,” Wrath said. “Little quiet time, feel me?” There was a ripple of male approval, which Beth took in stride—and with a blush—and then it was time for some privacy.

The Bible reads like a collection of books about people caught up in exodus and exile. It is a book that shows the destruction of imperialism and war. It shows how innocents suffer. The climax of the book is the suffering innocent saviour crucified on a tree. But, God is not done there, it is also a story of resurrection, redemption, and hope. It is the story of people with good news to share by words and action. It is counter-culture and more relevant now than some may realise. In an age of wars and rumours of war, an age of refugees in exile and mass exodus, it speaks of the need for love and compassion. The early followers of Jesus were famous for love and not hate. So while the extremists, the religiously ignorant, the politically cold, the divisive nationalists and the greedy arms dealers fuel the world's problems, and beat the war drums, let us the people of new birth be lights in the darkness and voices in the wilderness. Let us live and sing the song of love, for truly His banner over us is love. It is to that beat we march and in His name, not the gods of hate and war, but the God of love, the Prince of Shalom (peace). Soli Deo Gloria. Amen

In what is one of the most bizarre and ecologically damaging episodes of the Great Leap Forward, the country was mobilised in an all-out war against the birds. Banging on drums, clashing pots or beating gongs, a giant din was raised to keep the sparrows flying till they were so exhausted that they simply dropped from the sky. Eggs were broken and nestlings destroyed; the birds were also shot out of the air. Timing was of the essence, as the entire country was made to march in lockstep in the battle against the enemy, making sure that the sparrows had nowhere to escape. In cities people took to the roofs, while in the countryside farmers dispersed to the hillsides and climbed trees in the forests, all at the same hour to ensure complete victory. Soviet expert Mikhail Klochko witnessed the beginning of the campaign in Beijing. He was awakened in the early morning by the bloodcurdling screams of a woman running to and fro on the roof of a building next to his hotel. A drum started beating, as the woman frantically waved a large sheet tied to a bamboo pole. For three days the entire hotel was mobilised in the campaign to do away with sparrows, from bellboys and maids to the official interpreters. Children came out with slings, shooting at any kind of winged creature.77 Accidents happened as people fell from roofs, poles and ladders. In Nanjing, Li Haodong climbed on the roof of a school building to get at a sparrow’s nest, only to lose his footing and tumble down three floors. Local cadre He Delin, furiously waving a sheet to scare the birds, tripped and fell from a rooftop, breaking his back. Guns were deployed to shoot at birds, also resulting in accidents. In Nanjing some 330 kilos of gunpowder were used in a mere two days, indicating the extent of the campaign. But the real victim was the environment, as guns were taken to any kind of feathered creature. The extent of damage was exacerbated by the indiscriminate use of farm poison: in Nanjing, bait killed wolves, rabbits, snakes, lambs, chicken, ducks, dogs and pigeons, some in large quantities.

Finally, in keeping with Islam’s perennial threat and primordial boast, they used Hagia Sophia and many other churches as “a stable for their horses,” which they fed from toppled altars turned into troughs. Indeed, lest the jihadi pedigree of the sack be missed, the invaders everywhere set to desecrating and mocking all vestiges of Christianity—a sort of “Islam was here.” Thus, “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap… upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’” They “gouged the eyes from the [embalmed] saints” and dumped their corpses “in the middle of the streets for swine and dogs to trample on… and the images of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Saints were burned or hacked to pieces.

The touch no longer lingers Our eyes now scarcely meet Your heart beats sound of war drums And I hear silence in your speech