“What does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?”

“It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.”

“Everyone dies, but in the end it comes down to what you are willing to die for, Alexandria.”

“War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.”

“Men can, of course, be stirred into life by being dressed up in uniforms and made to blare out chants of war. It must be confessed that this is one way for men to break bread with comrades and to find what they are seeking, which is a sense of something universal, of self-fulfillment. But of this bread men die.”

“...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.”