These barbed wire quotes will inspire you. Barbed wire, also known as barb wire, occasionally corrupted as bobbed wire or bob wire, is a type of steel fencing wire constructed with sharp edges or points arranged at intervals along the strands.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging barbed wire quotes, barbed wire sayings, and barbed wire proverbs.
Best Barbed Wire Quotes
- “It is common talk that every individual is entitled to economic security. The only animals and birds I know that have economic security are those that have been domesticated–and the economic security they have is controlled by the barbed-wire fence, the butcher’s knife and the desire of others. They are milked, skinned, egged or eaten up by their protectors.” ~ Ray Lyman Wilbur
- “And I said to myself: That’s true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.” ~ Yehuda Amichai
- “The land of unlimited opportunity was for me, for a long time, impossible to reach. The wall, barbed wire and the order to shoot at those who tried to leave limited my access to the free world.” ~ Angela Merkel
- “What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.” ~ Sylvia Plath
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“This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.” ~ Pete Wentz
- “All anyone really needs to know about barbed wire is that it can tear the arse out of your trousers, give a cow a good fright, entangle a Yorkshire terrier for life, and is nasty stuff made by greedy men.” ~ Billy Connolly
- “We were made to believe / our faces betrayed us. / Our bodies were loud / with yellow / screaming flesh / needing to be silenced / behind barbed wire.” ~ Janice Mirikitani
- “All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
- “If the story’s there for it, if there’s a reason for it, then I’m all for it. But if you throw in a barbed wire match just to do a barbed wire match, then it makes no sense to me.” ~ CM Punk
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“It’s easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.” ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
- “Peaceful circulation has been interupted by barbed wire and concrete blocks. For a city or a people to be truly free, they must have the secure right, without economic, political or police pressure, to make their own choices and live their own lives.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
- “The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery–a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man’s knowledge.” ~ Rick Bass
- “The age of isolation is gone. And gone are the days in which barbed wire served as demarcation lines, separating and isolating countries from one another. No country can escape looking beyond its boundaries to find the source of the currents which influence how it can live with others.” ~ Gamal Abdel Nasser
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“I believe a young player will run through a barbed wire fence for you. An older player looks for a hole in the fence.” ~ Brendan
- “War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.” ~ George Takei
- “Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath.” ~ Luther Burbank
- “I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.” ~ George Takei
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“I devoted my career to building an affinity with my fans who have supported me unflinchingly and no barbed wire fence or prison wall will stop that.” ~ Foxy Brown
- “Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I’m not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky’s unbroken solitude. I don’t like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.” ~ Charles Lindbergh
- “What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first… it’s amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.” ~ Ron Rash
- “Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It puts what should be above things as they are. It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz
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“Information is the oxygen of the modern age.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not – and is not – a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a “barbed-wire entanglement” designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.” ~ Jacob G. Hornberger
- “Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence – their speech centres are destroyed – except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.” ~ William S. Burroughs
- “I believe a young player will run through a barbed wire fence for you. An older player looks for a hole in the fence, he’ll try and get his way through it some way, but the young player will fight for you.” ~ Brendan Rodgers
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“I’m secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft.” “I bet.” He almost purred. I gulped.” ~ Ilona Andrews
- “The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it until the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.” ~ Erich Maria Remarque
- “[Percy] kept hoping things would get better for Annabeth and him, but their lives just got more dangerous, as if the Three Fates were up there spinning their futures with barbed wire instead of thread just to see how much two demigods could tolerate.” ~ Rick Riordan
- “I can’t say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I use words like ‘brilliant,’ it would really be an under description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called ‘impenetrable barrier.’ It was a classic- absolutely classic- military breaching of a very very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier.” ~ Norman Schwarzkopf
- “When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats. I just do not believe that barbed-wire fences or guns on our border will solve any of our problems.” ~ Ron Paul
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“And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.” ~ Raymond Chandler
- “When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops – in desperation as the siege’s hunger bit – was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.” ~ Chris Cleave
- “I don’t believe that in the name of the holiness of the city you have to put barbed wires, machine gun nests, mine pins and everything of that, in the name of the holiness of Jerusalem.” ~ Yitzhak Rabin
- “Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night.” ~ Charles Stross
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“A woman’s dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.” ~ Sophia Loren
- “Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. Ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.” ~ Jeffrey Eugenides
- “You don’t want the United States to become South America, where you have a super collection of rich people at the tippy-top of society, they are surrounded by barbed wire living in McMansions with security guards, and the rest of the society is suffering, and you’ve got a broken educational system and a broken government.” ~ Anthony Scaramucci
- “I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.” ~ Harry Crews
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“I’d rather hug Magic Johnson after he rolled around in barbed wire.” ~ Jim Norton
- “There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.” ~ Alice Munro
- “One minute she acts like she wants to be with me and I’m the one rejecting her. The next, she’s got this barbed wire fence and barking dogs around her, like I can’t even ask her the simplest questions.” “And here I was assuming you didn’t care about her.” Stabbing his fingers through his hair, he groaned, “I don’t!” “And you make it perfectly clear.” Men. Idiots.” ~ Jennifer Armintrout
- “What’s so funny?” “Your panties have a bow,” he said. I looked down. I was wearing a short tank top -not mine- and my blue panties with a narrow white strip of lace at the top and a tiny white bow. Would it have killed me to check what I was wearing before I pulled the blanket down? “What’s wrong with bows?” “Nothing.” He was grinning now. “I expected barbed wire. Or one of those steel chains.” Wiseass. “I’m secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft.” “I bet.” ~ Ilona Andrews
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“True Love Isn’t Hearts & Flowers. It’s Blood & Guts & Bouquets Of Barbed Wire” ~ Dean Cavanagh
- “Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.” ~ David Berlinski
- “I read about a guy in Michigan this winter who was cruising along on his snow mobile. “Whoo hoo!” Didn’t see a barbed wire fence. FOOM – cut his head right off. And I’ll be honest with you, my first thought was… That’s how I want to go. Having the time of your life, “whoo hoo!” FOOM. I want the last thought in my head to be, ‘Hey, check out that headless snow mobile driver. He’s got a jacket just like mine.'” ~ David Crowe
- “A collection of huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in the huts lived 500 of the original inhabitants of our area. And so it went with many country towns around Australia.” ~ Phillip Noyce
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“Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” ~ Ronald Reagan
- “Once the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty candle; the candle in barbed wire. When I first lit the Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: ‘Better light a candle than curse the darkness.'” ~ Peter Benenson
- “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided.”Truth: Obama later said, “This was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given. The point we were simply making was, is that we don’t want barbed wire running through Jerusalem.” ~ Barack Obama
- “When our new armies are ready it seems folly to send them to Flanders, where they will chew barbed wire, or be wasted in futile frontal attacks.” ~ H. H. Asquith
