Quotes by Emmanuel Carrère

You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and its reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once youve tasted it, its like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, its idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact its like men and women, yin and yang: you need both.