Top 61 Quotes About War Generals
#1. The Continental army got more generals than they got private soldiers, these days. An officer lives through more 'n two battles, they make him some kind of general on the spot. Now, gettin' any pay for it, that's a different kettle of fish.
Diana Gabaldon
#2. Brains will always conquer brawn, in the end. The soldiers can flex their muscles all they want, but the well-thought-out tactics of the generals are what win the war.
Patrick Hall
#3. His generals were ready; his sons were. It remained to be seen whether the Arab nations were ready to meet them in war. In their arrogance, they had invited annihilation.
Conn Iggulden
#4. All generals, officers, and soldiers who capitulate in battle to save their own lives should be decimated.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#5. I have the impression that if the "armchair generals" arguers got their way and asked only war veterans what to do about Saddam Hussein, there would have been a rather abrupt "regime change" in Iraq long before now.
Christopher Hitchens
#6. What enables the enlightened rulers and good generals to conquer the enemy at every move and achieve extraordinary success is foreknowledge.
Sun Tzu
#7. War is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.
John Steinbeck
#8. When Lincoln ran into trouble during the Civil War, he got new generals. He brought in Grant. I hope that President Obama will bring in some new generals on the financial front.
Marcy Kaptur
#9. Here's the latest from the Pentagon
the generals are worried that the White House is spreading itself thin by trying to fight a war on two fronts; Afghanistan and Fox News.
Jay Leno
#10. As the First World War made painfully clear, when politicians and generals lead nations into war, they almost invariably assume swift victory, and have a remarkably enduring tendency not to foresee problems that, in hindsight, seem obvious.
Adam Hochschild
#11. It [the Mexican War] was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.
John Steinbeck
#12. All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
Barbara Kingsolver
#13. There are in Europe many good generals, but they see too many things at once. I see one thing, namely the enemy's main body. I try to crush it, confident that secondary matters will then settle themselves.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#15. For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war?
Secretary Robert Gates
Bob Woodward
#16. The politicians, who once stated that war was too complex to be left to the generals, now act as though peace were too complex to be left to themselves.
Pierre Trudeau
#17. With such incentives to brave deeds, and with the trust that God is with us, your generals will lead you confidently to the combat - assured of success. General commanding
Shelby Foote
#18. It's always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it's always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.
Paddy Chayefsky
#19. My generals should be like bull terriers on chains, and they should want war, war, war ... But what happens now? I want to go ahead with my aggressive politics and the generals try to stop me. That's a false situation.
Adolf Hitler
#20. In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort.
Bill Kristol
#21. Generals do not always run wars the way they would like to, nor the troops under them.
Christopher Vokes
#22. It's not the generals, it's the civilians who authorise and organise the worst war crimes.
Noam Chomsky
#24. Generals are fascinating cases of arrested development - after all, at five all of us wanted to be generals.
Peter Ustinov
#25. Just as war is too important to leave it to the generals, science and technology are too important to leave in the hands of the experts.
Sheldon Rampton
#27. Right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail
Charles Kaiser
#28. As we will see in the following pages, peacetime is not always kind to generals and they do not necessarily do well outside their task of generaling. Perhaps that is because during war they become as close to gods on earth as we are ever likely to see. Patton
Winston Groom
#29. War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.
Amy Goodman
#30. The home front is always underrated by Generals in the field. And yet that is where the Great War was won and lost. The Russian, Bulgarian, Austrian and German home fronts fell to pieces before their armies collapsed.
David Lloyd George
#31. Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.
Adolf Hitler
#32. When I warned them [the French] that Britain would fight on alone whatever they did, their generals told their Prime Minister and his divided Cabinet, In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken. Some chicken! Some neck!
Winston Churchill
#33. They have destroyed your weapons," he had told the generals, in effect. "But these weapons would in any case have become obsolete before the next war. That war will be fought with brand-new ones, and the army which is least hampered with obsolete material will have a great advantage.
Winston S. Churchill
#34. If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that Bush lied about WMD, the thumbnail version of Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.
Michael Hastings
#35. Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.
John Bolton
#36. Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.
Abraham Lincoln
#37. When the people of any country choose peace at all costs, not even generals can make war.
Pearl S. Buck
#38. Abraham Lincoln went through 12 generals before he got Ulysses S. Grant. He had never done a Civil War before.
Marianne Williamson
#39. Battles are sometimes won by generals; wars are nearly always won by sergeants and privates.
F. E. Adcock
#40. So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine.
Maureen Dowd
#41. I can make brigadier generals, but i can't make horses.
Abraham Lincoln
#42. During the Civil War, on hearing complaints that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant drank alcohol to excess Find out what Grant drinks and send a barrel of it to each of my other generals!
Abraham Lincoln
#43. Richmond's newspaper questioned how a senior general could not even get two of his own generals to cooperate with him. They nicknamed him "Granny" Lee or "The King Of Spades," because he insisted that his men dig trenches on Sewell Mountain.
Clint Johnson
#45. When I first met Mandela, we did not discuss anything of substance; we just felt each other out. He spent a long time expressing his admiration for the Boer generals and how ingenious they were during the Anglo-Boer war.
F. W. De Klerk
#47. In the half-reclined bed, Yaz slept, mouth open, snoring - probably doped. Mike turned on the TV. For twenty minutes, he watched retired generals on CNN discussing Afghanistan and troop surges as though they knew what the hell war was all about.
Pete Barber
#48. everyone is lied to for his or her own good. A mother telling a child it will be okay. A lover telling a lover I will always love you. Politicians promising a better and brighter future. Generals and admirals insisting war begets peace.
Julia Fierro
#49. The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its influence on the qualities of American life. Civic duty requires more.
David K. Shipler
#50. Nobody wins wars. Generals plan battles to be swift and decisive. When they are not, the aim is to end the conflict less defeated than your opponent.
Steph Bennion
#51. Good generals select intelligent officers, thoughtful advisors, and brave subordinates. They oversee their troops like a fierce tiger with wings.
Zhuge Liang
#52. Vivas to those who have fail'd!
And to those whose war-vessels sank in the sea!
And to those themselves who sank in the sea!
And to all generals that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes!
And the numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known!
Walt Whitman
#53. Ah! the Generals! they are numerous, but not good for much!
Aristophanes
#54. Four generals
Set our for Iran.
With the first one, war did not agree.
The second never won a victory.
For the third the weather never was right.
For the fourth the men would never fight.
Four generals
And not a single man!
Bertolt Brecht
#55. We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers
Robert E.Lee
#56. If war is too important to trust to generals, then policy is too important to trust to politicians.
Glen Cook
#57. There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they're great fun to write about.
Rick Atkinson
#58. His view of war - and he had seen a great deal of it - was that a general made as many blunders as he fought battles, but, by the grace of the gods, the opposing generals' blunders were sometimes worse.
Aubrey Menen
#59. Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.
Max McKeown
#61. Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.
Jay Samit
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