Top 100 Military History Quotes
#1. I get in trouble when I say things like, 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.
Caleb Carr
#2. House passes #dadt (don't ask don't tell) repeal. A step fwd on equality 4 gay Americans in military. History will judge those who tried 2 block passage on this.
Frank Pallone
#3. I've always been homeschooled, so doing it on set is kind of the same thing. My mom makes it very interactive - we'll get a book on chocolate and learn how to make it, or she will buy antique items. I love military history, the mechanics and strategy of it.
Atticus Shaffer
#4. [A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it's a good plan.
Adam Gopnik
#5. Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.
Jon Meacham
#6. The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?"
"Yes, they do, and they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!"
"I guess that explains their rich military history, then.
Howard Tayler
#7. When you look at a lot of the military histories, and even modern military history, everyone pretty much refers to each other by nicknames.
Pierce Brown
#8. He made my mom call and tell Maureen I wouldn't be in to see her anymore. He said therapy is a waste of money. He also told her to upgrade the cable service and to order him a subscription to Military History magazine. The he went and bought a new fishing pole for Matt, who is dead.
Tracy Bilen
#9. Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
Rudy Giuliani
#10. All military history records the triumphs of discipline and courage far more frequently than numbers and resources.
Robert E.Lee
#11. I have always had a keen interest in defence and military history and read more on this subject than anything else.
Bob Ainsworth
#12. Christopher Lynch has made the best and the first careful translation of Machiavelli's Art of War. With useful notes, an excellent introduction, an interpretive essay, glossary, and index, it is a treasure for readers of military history and Renaissance thought as well as for lovers of Machiavelli.
Harvey Mansfield
#13. If you go back into military history, the person who's leading the troops ought to be in with the troops and not just standing on the backline sending them into battle.
Richard Branson
#14. I love general history. That's all I read really. I don't read novels, I read history. I love it. I live in an area that's really rich in Civil War history. I live in Kentucky on a farm. A lot of revolution, a lot of military history I love.
Steve Zahn
#15. Rome, on the other hand, lost - suffering on that one day more battle deaths than the United States during the entire course of the war in Vietnam, suffering more dead soldiers than any other army on any single day of combat in the entire course of Western military history.
Robert L. O'Connell
#16. I think one of the great disasters (in military history) is the way that the Second World War has become the defining reference point for every crisis and every conflict.
Antony Beevor
#17. The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.
Henry Waxman
#18. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, Malcolm MacPherson vividly brings to life this harrowing story of courage, pathos, and war at its grittiest. For military history buffs, or those interested in the front lines of the war on terror, Roberts Ridge is a must read.
Jay Winik
#19. Obama's drone program, in fact, amounts to the largest unmanned aerial offensive ever conducted in military history: never have so few killed so many by remote control.
Michael Hastings
#20. During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U.S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.
Stephen Ambrose
#21. The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#22. You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.
John Edward Williams
#23. A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody.
William J. Clinton
#24. If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.
Fidel Castro
#26. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#27. It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.
Terry Pratchett
#28. Little did we guess that what has been called the century of the common man would witness as its outstanding feature more common men killing each other with greater facilities than any other five centuries together in the history of the world.
Winston Churchill
#29. History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia.
Herodotus
#30. The basis on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed was in addressing those problems in the history of Northern Ireland, the social and constitutional problems as well as the military problems that have been unaddressed for centuries.
John Reid
#31. When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen
Frederick L. Coxen
#32. Gang members have joined the military since the mid-1800s.
Carter F. Smith
#33. Combat is fast, unfair, cruel, and dirty. It is meant to be that way so that the terrible experience is branded into the memory of those who are fortunate enough to survive. It is up to those survivors to ensure that the experience is recorded and passed along to those who just might want to try it.
Bruce H. Norton
#34. Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.
Timothy Garton Ash
#35. We must learn from history, there is no military solution for the Kashmir issue ... we have to understand this reality.
Pervez Musharraf
#36. We're going to make him the best military commander in history. And then put the fate of the world on his shoulders.
Orson Scott Card
#37. Interestingly, when they are on our side, we usually refer to them as guerrillas or partisans or freedom fighters. When they, the men in the hills, oppose a government we support, we call them insurgents.
Dick Couch
#38. If we read history with an open mind, we cannot fail to conclude that, among all the military virtues, the energetic conduct of war has always contributed most to glory and success.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#39. Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow-creatures.
Leo Tolstoy
#40. History causes the military problem to become the essence of the political problem.
Vladimir Lenin
#41. As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#42. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the "savage" as European rather than as some native in the jungle.
David Grann
#43. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.
John Colville
#44. When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power.
Livy
#45. Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.
Michelle Bachelet
#46. Dr Dean Burk, who has spent more than fifty years in cancer research, mainly at the National Cancer Institute states: 'More people have died in the last thirty years from cancer connected with fluoridation than all the military deaths in the entire history of the United States.'
Dean Burk
#47. The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
#48. Those that aspire to raise their head above the crowd are most likely to have it shot off.
Leif Herrgesell
#49. On 9/11, 2001, the Navy stood at 316 ships. By 2008, after one of the great military buildups in American history, we were at 278 ships and had 49,000 fewer sailors.
Ray Mabus
#50. Underestimation of nonconventional units or a guerrilla enemy by regular forces is a cardinal military sin.
Howard R. Simpson
#51. Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.
Andrea Dworkin
#52. I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.
Winston Churchill
#53. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history ... On every level - moral, strategic, military and economic - Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
Tomas Young
#54. She could do anything with dynamite, except eat it.
Clare Mulley
#55. We must not let history repeat itself in Iraq. The reality is there is no military solution in Iraq. This is a sectarian war with long standing roots that were flamed when we invaded Iraq in 2003. Any lasting solution must be political and take into account respect for the entire Iraqi population.
Barbara Lee
#56. Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.
Peter A. Lorge
#57. Congress has mandated an annual report on street gang, outlaw biker, and domestic extremist activity in the military since 2008.
Carter F. Smith
#58. The time is not yet ripe to say what happened. When history's ready, then we can talk about it
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#59. There are these moments in the military where you're present at these enormous intersections of history and humanity. I came out of the end of that, and I just wanted to write. If you do it well, you know it will last. It can't get blown away like everything else.
Elliot Ackerman
#60. How ironic for peacemaking efforts to discover that hatred is stronger for many than love; that the longing to achieve power through military victories makes so many men lose their reason, forget all shame, and betray history.
Oscar Arias
#61. There is no record in the history of a nation that ever gained anything valuable by being unable to defend itself.
H.L. Mencken
#62. I have a cousin who is a spiritual advisor for Native veterans in Canada, so I'm very familiar with the history of Natives in the military. And growing up as an American Indian myself, the story of Ira Hayes is one that is often told.
Adam Beach
#63. We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history- a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world.
Willis Harman
#64. This high proportion of history's decisive campaigns, the significance of which is enhanced by the comparative rarity of the direct approach, enforces the conclusion that the indirect is by far the most hopeful and economic form of strategy.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#65. History has shown very clearly that for democracy to continue, the people, and not the generals or even the executive authority, must have control over the military. The
T.R. Fehrenbach
#66. A superpower that no longer stands for anything, that no one believes in anymore, that is seen only as a bully, will fall despite its military might. If the Bush administration ever wanted to reflect on history, it might think about this.
Mark Kurlansky
#67. Stupid Wars are easy to start but hard to end.
Ed Strosser
#68. If you look at history, there seems to be a regular pattern: the country with the most powerful military also happens to be the one with the world trade currency. That gives them an enormous economic advantage, which causes goods to flow into their country.
David Graeber
#69. Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.
Ted Cruz
#70. I often wonder what I will be remembered in history for. Scholar? Military hero? Builder?
Ferdinand Marcos
#71. The first gang members who joined the military were known as the Hounds, a group of former New York gang members.
Carter F. Smith
#72. Desert Storm was a war which involved the massive use of air power and a victory achieved by the U.S. and multinational air force units. It was also the first war in history in which air power was used to defeat ground forces.
Merrill McPeak
#73. Gentlemen, this is a story that you shall tell your grandchildren, and mightily bored they'll be.
Lt General Brian Horrocks
#74. To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.
George Orwell
#75. This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties.
Robert Higgs
#76. The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.
Douglas MacArthur
#77. Heroism doesn't always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man's life.
Mary Roach
#78. The military operation in Lebanon was the most successful military operation in recent Israeli history. Many in Israel don't recognise that.
Ehud Olmert
#79. I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.
Craig M. Mullaney
#80. Whether serving in the military, building industry, organizing politically, or making their way in any other part of American culture, the Irish were determined to create a free and prosperous life for themselves. This Irish-American struggle led to social and political progress for all Americans.
Rashers Tierney
#81. Reducing military presence has never in history won a war.
John McCain
#82. In the whole history of this country, we have probably won more friends from the power of our example than from the power of our military.
William J. Clinton
#83. The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman.
Dianna Skowera
#84. And when the man who commanded a nuclear arsenal and the greatest military in history was frightened, it meant that something other than human intervention was required. That, unfortunately, was part of Zach's job every day now. That was where Nathaniel Cade came in
Christopher Farnsworth
#85. No Big Power in all history ever thought of itself as an aggressor. That is still true today.
A.J. Muste
#86. One person's actions can alter the course of history, and a political or military mischance can touch off a catastrophic reaction that has repercussions over centuries.
Timothy Venning
#87. History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
#88. Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.
Samuel E. Morison
#89. The least likely of military leaders, Joan of Arc changed the course of the Hundred Years' War and of history.
Kathryn Harrison
#90. The dustbin of history is littered with remains of those countries that relied on diplomacy to secure their freedom. We must never forget ... in the final analysis ... that it is our military, industrial and economic strength that offers the best guarantee of peace for America in times of danger.
Ronald Reagan
#92. History offers no evidence for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to win wars, improve combat readiness, or promote national security.
Phyllis Schlafly
#93. Indeed, one of the most successful and influential religious organizations in history, the Society of Jesus, was consciously modeled along military lines by its founder, Ignatius Loyola.
Robert Shea
#94. Jesse and Frank James were the most well-known military-trained gang members
Carter F. Smith
#95. Iraq began destroying those missiles they don't have over the weekend. See, President Bush may be the smartest military president in history. First, he gets Iraq to destroy all of their own weapons. Then he declares war.
Jay Leno
#96. Gangs have had connections to the U.S. Military in every period since the founding of the country.
Carter F. Smith
#97. I'm too old to be ignorant as I am."
--Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.
Elle Thornton
#98. Turkey and Brazil, though half a world apart geographically, have much in common. Both are large countries that spent long years under military dominance, but have broken with that history and made decisive steps towards full democracy.
Stephen Kinzer
#99. I never thought about becoming a politician. But during the military dictatorship, my grandfather was put in prison six times and my father twice. If my family and my country didn't have this history, I might be a professor somewhere today.
George Papandreou
#100. Military Veterans have become gang members since the late 1700s.
Carter F. Smith
