2008-2009 Sri Lankan Army Northern Offensive/background

Famous quotes containing the words army, northern, offensive and/or background:

    That’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
    Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)

    Sophocles long ago
    Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought
    Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
    Of human misery; we
    Find also in the sound a thought,
    Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
    Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)

    There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
    Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)