Bill Mauldin Quotes

#1. The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.

Bill Mauldin

#2. Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

Bill Mauldin

#3. I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

Bill Mauldin

#4. I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergeants and jeeps which jump over mountains.

Bill Mauldin

#5. A soldier's life revolves around his mail. Like many others, I've been able to follow my kid's progress from the day he was born until now he is able to walk and talk a little, and although I have never seen him I know him very well.

Bill Mauldin

#6. My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it.

Bill Mauldin

#7. I drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something out of the humorous situations which come up even when you don't think life could be any more miserable.

Bill Mauldin

#8. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

Bill Mauldin

#9. Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude.

Bill Mauldin

#10. If you're a leader, you don't push wet spaghetti, you pull it.

Bill Mauldin

#11. I'm convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else.

Bill Mauldin

#12. 'Peace' is when nobody's shooting. A 'just peace' is when our side gets what it wants.

Bill Mauldin

#13. I was a born troublemaker and might as well earn a living at it.

Bill Mauldin

#14. [Editorial cartooning] is essentially a destructive art. We are not pontificators, or molders of thought - or at least we shouldn't try to be. Ours is more the role of the lowly gadfly: circle and stab, circle and stab. Roughly put, our credo should be, if it's big, hit it.

Bill Mauldin

#15. Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Bill Mauldin