Child Soldiers Quotes

“My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“We took a bowl each and started eating. He went back into the little room, and by the time he returned to the table with his own bowl of food to eat with us, we had already finished. He was shocked and looked around to see if we had done something else with the food.”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“so we were playing all this game then and thinking that to be a soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is looking so powerful and the men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they are killing people,but I am knowing now that to be a soldier is only to be weak and not strong, and to have no food to eat and not to eat whatever you want, and also to have people making you do thing that you are not wanting to do and not to be doing whatever you are wanting which is what they are doing in movie. But I am only knowing this now because I am soldier now.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation

“These boys have no idea what a child’s play is, childhood is an endangered and fleeting phase of life for everyone around here.” –Christian Ezora.”
― Ray Anyasi, Ujasiri

“I’ve been raised by a father who is the consummate macho man. He has a face carved of stone and wouldn’t give anyone the chance to believe that he might have any feelings of pain or sadness. He brought me and my there brothers up not to cry.”
― Michael Zboray, Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969

“Children can be murderers... Little boys can be monsters”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“I'm walking walking walking to where the sun is setting. I'm looking at it and wanting to catch it in my hand and to be squeezing until color are dripping out from it forever. That way everywhere it is always dark and nobody is ever having to see any of the terrible thing that is happening in this world.”
― uzodinma iweala, Beasts of No Nation

“I was so happy that my mother, father, and two brothers had somehow found one another. Perhaps my mother and father have gotten back together, I thought.”
― Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

“A war that includes four-year-olds with AK 47s is a war that no one can win — been if some men... go home victorious.”
― Alex Latimer, The Space Race

“And now the woman is praying to God............... I am laughing laughing because God is forgetting everybody in this country.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, Beasts of No Nation

“In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn't matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“Rachel ran over, grabbed Marco by the shoulders, and gave him a good hard shake. "Come on, you big baby, say it - free or dead!"
"Yeah, yeah, free or dead," Marco said. Then he laughed. "Rachel, you do know you're insane, right?"
"Yes, but she's a Packard Foundation Outstanding Student who's insane," Cassie chimed in.
"I'm sure the Yeerks will be impressed," Marco said.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Change

“When your mates tossed soccer balls
and braided each other’s hair,
you were issued a Kalashnikov,
given a rag tag uniform,
and set upon the path of Hannibal instead.”
― Valentine Okolo, I Will Be Silent

“I believe we must set up three children's colonies, the aim of these colonies is above all to furnish us with soldiers.”
― Leopold II