Historical Military Quotes

#1. When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them.

Jonathan Powell

#2. We should be more modest in our belief that we can impose democracy on a country through military force.

Barack Obama

#3. I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine - I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.

Jean Webster

#4. In no other type of warfare does the advantage lie so heavily with the aggressor.

James Franck

#5. The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

Herbert Butterfield

#6. No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.

A.J. Muste

#7. I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

W.S. Gilbert

#8. Teaching the child to treat boundaries seriously teaches the child to respect the rights and needs of others. Thinking of another's needs creates empathy.

Warren Farrell

#9. It has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre ...

Robert Harris

#10. Now the British are coming. I think Cameron should ask the Chinese government not to make people 'disappear' or to jail them merely because they have different opinions.

Ai Weiwei

#11. Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended.

Saddam Hussein

#12. The flesh is willing to flatter itself, and many who now give themselves every indulgence, promise to themselves an easy entrance into life. THus men practice mutual deception on each other and fall asleep in wicked indifference.

John Calvin

#13. I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that he was beautiful. I weep for him because whenever he lay on my banks and looked into my waters, I could see my own beauty reflected in his eyes.

Paulo Coelho

#14. The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.

Mark Riebling

#15. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

Chris Womersley

#16. I find that forgiving one's enemies is a most curious morbid pleasure; perhaps I should check it.

Oscar Wilde

#17. it was the power of the military, and in particular that of the Air Force, which was the hidden hand that allowed universalist ideas to matter so much more than terrain and the historical experience of people living on it.

Robert D. Kaplan

#18. At the end of the first half-century of engine-driven flight, we are confronted with the stark fact that the historical significance of aircraft has been primarily military and destructive.

Charles Lindbergh