J. F. C. Fuller Quotes

#1. Artillery conquers and infantry occupies.

J. F. C. Fuller

#2. The governments of the Western nations, whether monarchical or republican, had passed into the invisible hands of a plutocracy, international in power and grasp. It was, I venture to suggest, this semi-occult power which ... pushed the mass of the American people into the cauldron of World War I.

J. F. C. Fuller

#3. If in the place of God we write "Reality", "Nature", "Unknowable", or "Zero", it matters not one whit; the equation is just as obscure; for all we have done is to replace a by b, c, d, or e, not knowing what these letters mean. The symbol has changed, but what it symbolizes remains as inscrutable.

J. F. C. Fuller

#4. To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation.

J. F. C. Fuller

#5. As the aeroplane is the most mobile weapon we possess, it is destined to become the dominant offensive arm of the future.

J. F. C. Fuller

#6. The strongest army in the world [the French] facing no more than twenty-six [German] divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!

J. F. C. Fuller

#7. Air warfare is a shot through the brain, not a hacking to pieces of the enemy's body.

J. F. C. Fuller

#8. An Army is still a crowd, though a highly organized one. It is governed by the same laws, and under the stress of war is ever tending to revert to its crowd form. Our object in peace is so to train it that the reversion will become very slow.

J. F. C. Fuller

#9. National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob, always demented and the second a king, generally sane.

J. F. C. Fuller

#10. What thrust us into war were not Hitler's political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear.

J. F. C. Fuller

#11. Adherence to dogmas has destroyed more armies and cost more battles than anything in war.

J. F. C. Fuller

#12. In the World War nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.

J. F. C. Fuller

#13. It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal.

J. F. C. Fuller