Tag: War

Quotes November 04, 2022

Out of every hundred men, ten should not even be there; eighty are just targets, nine are real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one is a warrior who will bring the others back.
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher
 
 
 
 
If there is no war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
Theodore Roosevelt
 
 
 
 
Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes to manoeuvre, and the less he demands in slaughter.
Winston S. Churchill
 
 
 
 
If you find yourself in a fair fight, you didn’t plan your mission properly.
David Hackworth.
 
 
 
 
The supreme quality of leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, whether on a section gang, on a football field, in an army, or in an office.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight—it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
 
 
 
Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it except as a means of peace.
Ulysses S. Grant

 
 
 
 
If you’re never satisfied with what you have achieved, you’re never going to be satisfied with what you do achieve.
Chris LoCurto
 
 
 
 
We do not seek peace to be at war, but we go to war so that we may have peace. Therefore, be peaceful in warring so that you may conquer those you war against and bring them to the prosperity of peace.
St. Augustine
 
 
 
 
The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.
Ronald Reagan
 
 
 
 
We fight to win and win with a knockout because there are no runners-up in war.
Gen. JJ Singh

Quotes February 25, 2022

“’Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly,’” he said, reciting the verse. “That’s Micah 6:8, and that’s my command philosophy.”
Lt. Gen. Xavier Brunson, commanding general of I Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McChord
 
 
 
 
“There is no purgatory for war criminals. They go straight to hell.”
Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, on February 23, 2022.
 
 
 
 
​A good law is clear, concise and enforceable​.
Dan Holloway, 82nd Airborne, Retired
 
 
 
 
Its Only a Bad Neighborhood If Your Not Bad Enough To Be There
Marcus Luttrell
 
 
 
 
“Figure it out or die.”
Eugene Goodman’s Army platoon sergean
 
 
 
 
“A soldier (just returned from the Western Front) was so disordered while he was going down the stairs into the London tube station, he became suddenly aware of the crowds of people coming up; he looked haggardly about, and evidently mistaking the hollow space below for the trenches and the ascending crowd for Germans, fixed his bayonet and charged. But for the women constable on duty at the turn of the staircase, who was quick enough to divine his trouble and hang on to him with all her strength to prevent his forward advance, he would have wounded many and caused danger and panic.”
Mary Allen, British policewoman
 
 
 
 
“All the horrors of all the ages were brought together; not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them… Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate… Every effort was made to starve entire nations into submission, without regard to age or sex. Monuments and cities were smashed by artillery. Bombs were cast down from the air indiscriminately. Poison gas stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered in the dark recesses of the sea.”
Winston Churchill, British prime minister
 
 
 
 
“Rats came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welch, a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.”
Capt. Robert Graves’ Autobiography, Goodbye To All That
 
 
 
 
“For God’s sake, don’t enlist and come to this war in Europe. Cannons, machine guns, rifles and bombs are going day and night. In my company there are only 10 men left.”
Havildar Abdul Rahman, an Indian soldier serving with the British forces in the trenches of World War I

Quotes January 21, 2022

“As Red Tails, we are together for a brief moment in time, placed in each other’s lives to accomplish something bigger than any individual or unit, and all for the betterment of our nation,” Stahl said at the awards ceremony. “We will not squander this opportunity.”
Lt. Col. Brian Stahl
 
 
 
 
“If they had lost more of those bombers, there would be less of us,” said Terance “T.J.” Spann, President of the Tidewater Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. “I hope you take away an appreciation of what they accomplished and how many lives they actually saved.”
 
 
 
 
Your name is unknown. Your deed is immortal.
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Moscow)
 
 
 
 
“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
Civil rights leader and formerly enslaved worker Frederick Douglass, 1863, in remarks encouraging the enlistment of African American soldiers during the Civil War.
 
 
 
 
“The unparalleled perseverance of the armies of the United States, through almost every possible suffering and discouragement for the space of eight long years, was little short of a standing miracle.”
General (and future President) George Washington, 1783, in his farewell orders to the Continental Army.
 
 
 
 
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated [this ground], far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
President Abraham Lincoln, 1863, in the Gettysburg Address.
 
 
 
 
“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”
President Woodrow Wilson, 1919, in proclaiming Armistice Day (which would later become Veterans Day) on the anniversary of the end of World War I.
 
 
 
 
“I saw your sons and your husbands, your brothers and your sweethearts. I saw how they worked, played, fought, and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate, and more devotion to duty than could exist under tyranny.”
Comedian Bob Hope, 1944, in “I Never Left Home,” his book about going on tour to entertain the troops, which he did in every U.S. conflict from World War II to the Persian Gulf War.
 
 
 
 
“The nicest veterans…the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.”
Author Kurt Vonnegut, 1969, in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” his novel about the Allied firebombing of Dresden during World War II.
 
 
 
 
“Homeless and at-risk veterans need more than just shelter. We must give them the tools to empower themselves and reclaim the self-worth and dignity which comes from occupying a place in the American dream. It is a dream they fought so hard to defend for the rest of us.”
Homelessness advocate and film producer Maria Cuomo Cole, 2015, in an editorial pointing out that tens of thousands of vets are homeless.
 
 
 
 
“We cannot just keep worshipping veterans. They’re just people. They’re people who did a job. It’s a dirty, nasty, demanding job.”
Iraq War veteran and author Roy Scranton, 2016, in an interview with a reporter.

Quotes September 24, 2021

“There are winners and losers. A loser is just a winner that tried one more time.”
Chris VanSant, a retired Army infantryman, Ranger, Green Beret, and Operator in 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta (1st SFOD-D)
 
 
 
 
I do not regard the procuring of peace as a matter in which we should play the role of arbiter between different opinions…more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward.
Otto von Bismarck
 
 
 
 
“We were at war. I wanted to do my part.”
Stephen Kraft, who joined the army at age 28 after 9/11.
 
 
 
 
“I can at least go out and defend my country and do something honorable as a father. Show my son something good.”
Joshua Hernandez, who joined after 9/11, and deployed to Iraq twice.
 
 
 
 
“I just wanted to do something to support those young people.”
Matthew Niblack, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who joined the National Guard as a sergeant with an age wavier in his early 50s and deployed to Kuwait.
 
 
 
 
“Discipline is the soul of an army.”
George Washington
 
 
 
 
“Front toward enemy”
Extremely brief and practical advice on an M18 claymore mine
 
 
 
 
“I’d do it all again if I had the chance.”
Zachariah Chitwood, a veteran of the U.S. Army who was wounded in Iraq.
 
 
 
 
“I’d learned a lot in the Army. I knew that above all things in the world I had to become so big, so strong that people and their hatred could never touch me.”
Sammy Davis, Jr.
 
 
 
 
“Hooah!”
Pretty much the entire U.S. Army.
 
 
 
 
“They’ve got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.”
Gen. Creighton Abrams
 
 
 
 
“9/11 changed the entire direction of my life.”
Fred Wellman, who had served as a helicopter pilot in the Army and rejoined after September 11 to serve as a public affairs officer.
 
 
 
 
“It took me another 18 months to convince my wife to let me join the Army National Guard. We had two small children, so it was a very hard decision
for her.”
Joel Bottem, a veteran who rejoined after 9/11
 
 
 
 
“It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.”
Zell Miller
 
 
 
 
“The most striking thing I have seen throughout my almost four years of service are the NCOs who are willing to do anything for their soldiers. … It’s amazing to have and know people who are willing to go out of their way for you.”
Stephanie Schneider, Afghanistan veteran
 
 
 
 
“The sergeant is the Army.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
 
 
 
“My answer is bring ’em on.”
President George W. Bush, talking about insurgents attacking U.S. military members in July 2003
 
 
 
 
“I’m very happy with how it all played. I was very blessed. That was my idea, to go to enlist, do one tour and fight and get out.”
David Kaefring, U.S. Army veteran of Afghanistan
 
 
 
 
“So far, I’ve spent my entire adult life fighting.”
James Coleman, U.S. Army sergeant
 
 
 
 
“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.
Colin Powell
 
 
 
 
“Lead from the front.”
Audie Murphy, most decorated U.S. soldier in World War II
 
 
 
 
It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.
Norman Schwarzkopf
 
 
 
 
“What can we do to support the troops? Give them a nation that is worthy of protection.”
Two-tour Army veteran who emailed me when I was writing an article for The Atlantic in 2007
 
 
 
 
“At this point, Sergeant Bellavia, armed with a M249 SAW gun, entered the room where the insurgents were located and sprayed the room with gunfire … Seeing a Jihadist loading an RPG launcher, Sergeant Bellavia gunned him down. … Sergeant Bellavia then came under fire from the insurgent upstairs and the staff sergeant returned the fire, killing the man. … Sergeant Bellavia pursued, but slipped on the blood-soaked stairs. … Sergeant Bellavia put a choke hold on the wounded insurgent to keep him from giving away their position. … In the wild scuffle that followed, Sergeant Bellavia took out his knife and slit the Jihadist’s throat.”
Silver Star citation for David S. Bellavia, Iraq, whose award was upgraded to the Medal of Honor
 
 
 
 
“This is all normal, routine stuff. Dude with the AK that I shot in the street? That’s routine. The dudes digging an IED? That’s an everyday occurrence.”
An Army lieutenant whose platoon I embedded with in Iraq in 2007
Bill Murphy Jr.

Quotes September 03, 2021

Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G.K. Chesterton
 
 
 
 
“The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
 
 
 
“It is necessary for us to learn from others’ mistakes. You will not live long enough to make them all yourself.”
Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
 
 
 
 
“PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
General James Mattis
 
 
 
 
“Great powers don’t get angry, great powers don’t make decisions hastily in a crisis.”
General John Allen
 
 
 
 
“Clarity and simplicity are the antidotes to complexity and uncertainty.”
General George Casey
 
 
 
 
“Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.”
General Douglas MacArthur
 
 
 
 
“Leadership is a gift. It’s given by those who follow. You have to be worthy of it.”
General Mark Welsh

Quotes April 02, 2021

“Be an example to your men, in your duty and in private life. Never spare yourself and let your troops see that you do not in your endurance of fatigue and privation. Be always tactful and well-mannered. Avoid excessive sharpness of voice, which usually indicates the man who has shortcomings of his own to hide.”
German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel
 
 
 
 
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty— never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
Winston Churchill
 
 
 
 
“The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.”
Calvin Coolidge
 
 
 
 
“The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
Douglas MacArthur, an American soldier
 
 
 
 
“The reason the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis.”
Karl Dönitz, German Grand Admiral
 
 
 
 
“The best armour is staying out of gun-shot.”
Italian proverb
 
 
 
 
“We live in a world that has walls, and those walls need to be guarded by men with guns.”
Aaron Sork
 
 
 
 
“The time is now at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own…The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.”
President George Washington, July 2, 1776, Writings Of George Washington
 
 
 
 
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
President Abraham Lincoln, 1860, Collected Works

Quotes October 22 & 23, 2020

“For the first time in a long time, I felt like I had a purpose being in the Navy. It wasn’t about money and rank or prestige. It was about raising the flag. We do what we do because no one else can or will do it. We fight so others can sleep at night. And I had forgotten that.”
Timothy Ciciora
 
 
 
 
“Today we say goodbye to a proud warrior. As we leave, each of us will take our members of [the USS]Midway with us… you guys were the ‘Magic.’ It was a privilege to sail with you.”
John Schork
 
 
 
 
“Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.”
”Preparedness is the key to success and victory.”
General of the Army, Douglas MacArthur
 
 
 
 
“The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country”
George S. Patton Jr.
 
 
 
 
”Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.”
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States, and former General of the Army
 
 
 
 
“The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.”
“Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army
 
 
 
 
“Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy. Do not interfere with an army that is returning home.”
Sun Tzu
 
 
 
 
“Hopefully one-day Wars will only be fought in movies. And may the best producer win!”
Stanley Victor Paskavich

Quotes August 28, 2020

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.”
Laurence Binyon
 
 
 
 
“I have lived now for over a century, yet I can still say with complete confidence that no one can claim to have plumbed the depths of human misery who has not shared the fore-ends of a submarine with a camel.”
John Biggins, A Sailor of Austria: In Which, Without Really Intending to, Otto Prohaska Becomes Official War Hero No. 27 of the Habsburg Empire
 
 
 
 
“In 1917 I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.”
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
 
 
 
 
“If war was once a chivalrous duel, it is now a dastardly slaughter.”
Artur von Bolfras
 
 
 
 
“It doesn’t matter now that they lived and died, but rather did they make a difference?”
D. Dauphinee, Highlanders Without Kilts
 
 
 
 
“The Allied governments, for example, with the British as executors, maintained in place the food blockade of Germany that had been in effect since 1917. A British authority would note that “in the last two years of the war, nearly 800,000 noncombatants died in Germany from starvation or diseases attributed to undernourishment. The biggest mortality was among children between the ages of 5 and 1 5, where the death rate increased by 55 percent. . . a whole generation [the one which had been born and lived during Hitler’s rise to power] grew up in an epoch of undernourishment and misery such as we [British] have never in this country experienced.”3 A distinguished American authority on United States foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century, Stanford University professor Thomas A. Bailey, noted that “the Allied slow starvation of Germany’s civilian population was quiet, unspectacular, and censored.”4 The Englishman Gilbert Murray, writing in 1933, noted that future historians would probably regard the establishment and continuation of the blockade as one of those many acts of almost incredible inhumanity which made World War I conspicuous in history.
Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 122”
Russel H.S. Stolfi

Quotes August 07, 2020

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
Abraham Lincoln
 
 
 
 
All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers… Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.
Francois Fenelon
 
 
 
 
A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me.
Robert E. Lee
 
 
 
 
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins.
Ulysses S. Grant
 
 
 
 
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman

Quotes July 17, 2020

“Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.”
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924
 
 
 
 
“There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.”
Tucker Elliot, The Day Before 9/11
 
 
 
 
“The simple and terrifying reality, forbidden from discussion in America, was that despite spending $600 billion a year on the military, despite having the best fighting force the world had ever known, they were getting their asses kicked by illiterate peasants who made bombs out of manure and wood.”
Michael Hastings, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan
 
 
 
 
“Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.”
Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
 
 
 
 
“Troops are everywhere in their modern, digital camouflage, designed to blend in anywhere at any time. Yet at night we wear bright yellow reflective belts.”
Glenn Dean, Soldier / Geek: An Army Science Advisor’s Journal of the War in Afghanistan
 
 
 
 
“Give me a scholar, therefore, who is able to think and to write, to look with an eye of discernment into things, and to do business himself, if called upon, who hath both civil and military knowledge; one, moreover, who has been in camps, and has seen armies in the field and out of it; knows the use of arms, and machines, and warlike engines of every kind; can tell what the front, and what the horn is, how the ranks are to be disposed, how the horse is to be directed, and from whence to advance or to retreat; one, in short, who does not stay at home and trust to the reports of others: but, above all, let him be of a noble and liberal mind; let him neither fear nor hope for anything; otherwise he will only resemble those unjust judges who determine from partiality or prejudice, and give sentence for hire: but, whatever the man is, as such let him be described.”
Lucian of Samosata, Lucian’s True History;
 
 
 
 
“For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo. Geronimo E.K.I.A”
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