C. J. Chivers famous quotes

Without question the AK-47 was a remarkable invention, and not just because it works so well, or because it changed how wars are fought, or because it proved to be one of the most important products of the 20th century.
-- C. J. Chivers

#War #Important #Invention

The automatic Kalashnikov is a tool, an implement designed for ordinary men, without much training or undue complications, to kill other men, and to be used in the conditions in which wars are often fought. But it's only a tool, and while its ready availability in many unstable lands can be seen as kindling violence, this is not simply because of the weapon's qualities themselves. It is because of the quantities of the weapons that have been made.
-- C. J. Chivers

#War #Men #Training

Certainly the automatic Kalashnikov's ease of use and durability make it desirable for all sorts of people up to no good. But rifles are rifles - there are many other choices out there. You see the Kalashnikov almost everywhere there is fighting because there are so many of them.
-- C. J. Chivers

#Fighting #People #Choices

Everywhere I went on my job covering conflict, the Kalashnikov was the predominant arm.
-- C. J. Chivers

#Conflict

Actually, in a lot of circumstances, the Kalashnikov is poorly used by people who are not especially good shots, or who are outright bad shots. In these cases, the rifle's weaknesses emerge. As far as accuracy goes, the Kalashnikov is stubbornly mediocre, and the ease with which it can be fired on automatic means that many people fire it on automatic when they would be better served firing a single, aimed shot. Getting shot at by a sniper is a much different experience, and far more frightening. But either experience is, to borrow your word, memorable. These memories are pretty much all bad.
-- C. J. Chivers

#Memories #Memorable #Mean

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

To the Parisians, and especially to the children, all Americans are now 'heros du cinema.' This is particularly disconcerting to sensitive war correspondents, if any, aware, as they are, that these innocent thanks belong to those American combat troops who won the beachhead and then made the breakthrough. There are few such men in Paris.

The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.

Bismarck fought 'necessary' wars and killed thousands, the idealists of the twentieth century fight 'just' wars and kill millions.

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.

The search is more important than the destination

Good isn't my thing but Sawyer's important to me. Please remember I've got my limits and you studying my mouth like you want a taste is pushing me dangerously close to the edge of those limits.

The inventions and the great discoveries have opened up whole continents to reciprocal communication and interchange, provided we are willing.

Invention is arrived at by intelligent stumbling.

And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.