War General Quotes

#1. I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.

Mark Helprin

#2. You might be a redneck if more than one living relative is named after a Southern Civil War general.

Jeff Foxworthy

#3. Arthur Scargill is the Labour movements nearest equivalent to a First World War General.

Neil Kinnock

#4. Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.

Sun Tzu

#5. When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer, and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.

Herbert Hoover

#6. Sir, if you ever presume again to speak disrespectfully of General Grant in my presence, either you or I will sever his connection with this university.

Robert E.Lee

#7. The majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.

Desiderius Erasmus

#8. Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.

Sun Tzu

#9. We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

Neil Sheehan

#10. Before this war is over, I intend to be a Major General or a corpse.

Isaac R. Trimble

#11. It really is my opinion that media in general are so bad that we have to question whether the world wouldn't be better off without them altogether. They are so distortive to how the world actually is that the result is.. we see wars, and we see corrupt governments continue on.

Julian Assange

#12. Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise; for the result is waste of time and general stagnation.

Sun Tzu

#13. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.

Robert Heilbroner

#14. We are Americans, speaking the same language, adopting the same customs, holding the same general opinions ... and shall rise and fall with Americans.

Frederick Douglass

#15. Wars are Spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and co-ordinates.

Ernest Hemingway,

#16. The general at the radar screenRubbed his hands with glee,And grinning pressed the buttonAnd started world war three.

Roger McGough

#17. General, if you put every Union soldier now on the other side of the Potomac on that field to approach me over the same line, I will kill them all before they reach my line.

James Longstreet

#18. When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

Trevor Nunn

#19. When a general, unable to estimate the enemy's strength, allows an inferior force to engage a larger one, or hurls a weak detachment against a powerful one, and neglects to place picked soldiers in the front rank, the result must be rout.

Sun Tzu

#20. It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.

John Jay

#21. In any war who pulls their general out? No one.

Ray Lewis

#22. Everything changed in Bosnia, when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high- level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action.

Joe Bob Briggs

#23. But Polybius brought out the basic lesson in his reflection-'for as a ship, if you deprive it of its steersman, falls with all its crew into the hands of the enemy; so, with an army in war, if you outwit or out-manoeuvere its general, the whole will often fall into your hands'.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#24. Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.

Lester B. Pearson

#25. The general that hearkens to my counsel and acts upon it, will conquer: let such a one be retained in command! The general that hearkens not to my counsel nor acts upon it, will suffer defeat: - let such a one be dismissed!

Sun Tzu

#26. If there is not the war, you don't get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don't get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.

Theodore Roosevelt

#27. Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

Smedley Butler

#28. People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich - don't want to buy anything

Frida Kahlo

#29. Now an army is exposed to six several calamities, not arising from natural causes, 1 but from faults for which the general is responsible. These are: (1) Flight; (2) insubordination; (3) collapse; (4) ruin; (5) disorganisation; (6) rout.

Sun Tzu

#30. Make time for planning: Wars are won in the general's tent.

Stephen Covey

#31. It is said that the inferior seek to emulate the superior. Thus, if a general slackens only a little, those beneath him will be greatly negligent.

Kato Kiyomasa

#32. I have an opinion about holy war, which in general I must keep to myself. I have no wish to be known as a heretic. It is ... that if a war can be holy, then God cannot. At best a war can only be necessary.

Louis De Bernieres

#33. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.

Mao Zedong

#34. General, unless he offers us honorable terms, come back and let us fight it out!

James Longstreet

#35. Norman Cherry wrote on Twitter:

'Recently finished reading War on Wheels: a wonderful account of the people and systems necessary to fight a successful war. I really enjoyed reading it. Thoroughly researched, well written, very accessible and suitable for specialist or general reader.

Philip Hamlyn Williams

#36. A clever general, therefore, avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return.

Sun Tzu

#37. General Longstreet,when once in a fight, was a most brilliant soldier; but he was the hardest man to move I had in my army.

Robert E.Lee

#38. General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down.

Joseph Heller

#39. The chief problem is, of course, whether the marching of the general spirit of things is heading consciously or sub- consciously toward an idea of extension of boundaries.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#40. And why is Grant so solemn today upon our great achievement, except he knows this unmeaning inhuman planet will need our warring imprint to give it value, and that our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.

E.L. Doctorow

#41. 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

#42. The admiral needs only one science, that of navigation. The general needs all the sciences.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#43. How many have gone? How many more to go? The Admiralty is fast asleep and lethargy & inertia are the order of the day. However everybody seems delighted - so there is nothing to be said. No plans, no enterprise, no struggle to aid the general cause. Just sit still on the spacious throne and snooze.

Winston Churchill

#44. 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

#45. The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.

Rebecca Harding Davis

#46. At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right.

Nigel Hamilton

#47. 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

#48. The vast majority of us don't want to face the fact that we're in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They're all facets of a general upheaval.

Johnny Carson

#49. Our cause in the war on terror isn't helped when we have army officers like Lieutenant General William Boykin speaking in evangelical churches and claiming this as some sort of battle for the Christian religion. That's wrong. That's un-American.

John F. Kerry

#50. Khaldoun believed that the great curse of civilization is not war or famine but humidity: "When the moisture, with its evil vapors ascends to the brain, the mind and body and the ability to think are dulled. The result is stupidity, carelessness and a general intemperance.

Eric Weiner

#51. A weapon is merely a weapon, nothing more. What matters is how you use it.

Kaoru Kurimoto

#52. The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance.

Marco Tempest

#53. Finally one evening somebody suggested Python (a great name for an untrustworthy impresario, I thought), someone else added Monty, which had connotations of our greatest World War II general, there was hysteria, and history was made. A

John Cleese

#54. There's a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It's like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun's rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won't put out the sun.

Richard K. Morgan

#55. The powers-that-be understand that to create the appropriate atmosphere for war, it's necessary to create within the general populace a hatred, fear or mistrust of others regardless of whether those others belong to a certain group of people or to a religion or a nation.

James Morcan

#56. The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.

Christine Jennings

#57. My dad was in the Second World War with General Patton. He won medals for bravery, but he came home quite damaged, so he was a handful. He told us some terrible stories, and I guess you'd say he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Jerry Hall

#58. There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.

Aidan Gillen

#59. When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Noam Chomsky

#60. If you would make war,' he would say to to General d'Hedouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.

Andrew Roberts

#61. Also, General Zinni, who commanded central command, was very much opposed to the war in the first place, as I was. We were both quoted to that effect in February of 2003.

William Odom

#62. President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now.

Roy Wilkins

#63. The 'Cold War' impinged on the daily lives of Americans. The wars after 11 September 2001 have been fought without the general American population having to make any sacrifices. It goes on, and so do we.

Stanley Hauerwas

#64. Wo Hunger herrscht, ist auf die Dauer kein Friede."

("Where there is hunger, there cannot be lasting peace.)

Speech before the United Nations General Assembly, September 26, 1973

Willy Brandt

#65. When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.

Nicolas Roeg

#66. It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

Deborah Tannen

#67. Three cheers for the war. Three cheers for Italy's war and three cheers for war in general. Peace is hence absurd or rather a pause in war.

Benito Mussolini

#68. I grew up in a time when people believed in duty, honor and country. My grandfathers were both officers. My father was a General in the Air Force. My brother and I were both in the Army. I've always felt a kinship with soldiers; I think it's possible to support the warrior and be against the war.

Kris Kristofferson

#69. Floyd did not accept the blame for his defeat. He blamed his fellow general Henry Wise for not committing some of his regiments to the battle. Wise reacted to the charge by calling Floyd "that bullet-hit son of a bitch.

Clint Johnson

#70. General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!

Robert McNamara

#71. General [John] Pope is impulsive and hasty, but energetic, and, what is of most importance, patriotic and sound
perfectly sound.I look for good results.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#72. I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it.

George Lucas

#73. The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general.

George Crumb

#74. Being shelled is the main work of an infantry soldier, which no one talks about. Everyone has his own way of going about it. In general, it means lying face down and contracting your body into as small a space as possible.

Louis Simpson

#75. Cyber war takes place largely in secret, unknown to the general public on both sides.

Noah Feldman

#76. Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms ...

Simone Weil

#77. In her opinion, Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence Birdseye are the two greatest Americans that ever lived excluding Robert E. Lee. She believes we never lost the War Between the States, that General Lee thought General Grant was the butler and just naturally handed him his sword.

Fannie Flagg

#78. Humanity also suffered; though, save in the regions near the seat of war, it was in general only the children and the old people who suffered greatly.

Olaf Stapledon

#79. All morning they watched for the plane which they thought would be looking for them. They cursed war in general and PTs in particular. At about ten o'clock the hulk heaved a moist sigh and turned turtle.

John Hersey

#80. General, get up dress quick you are a prisoner!

John S. Mosby

#81. A victorious general must know how to employ severity, justness, and mildness by turns, if he would allay sedition or prevent it.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#82. The mind of a general ought to resemble and be as clear as the field-glass of a telescope.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#83. Some general officers should pay a stricter regard to truth than to call the depopulating other countries the service of their own.

Henry Fielding

#84. I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book 'War is a Racket.'

Jesse Ventura

#85. It is exceptional and difficult to find in one man all the qualities necessary for a great general.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#86. In war, the general alone can judge of certain arrangements. It depends on him alone to conquer difficulties by his own superior talents and resolution.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#87. As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another.

John Stuart Mill

#88. 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

#89. In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#90. Poland, after the First World War, was beset by chaos, disorder, and a foolish incursion by the Red Army, which helped to produce the ultra-nationalist military dictatorship of General Pilsudski.

Tariq Ali

#91. There's many a boy here today that looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.

General William T. Sherman, Address, 1880

John Podlaski

#92. I was in charge of price controls in World War II and had a ceiling on overall prices. Everybody who was subject to general maximum price regulation wanted an exception and went to Congress to persuade a Congressman, or a group of people on the Hill, that I was being a menace to their industry.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#93. I do not want to make this charge. I do not see how it can succeed. I would not make it now but that General Lee has ordered it and expects it.

James Longstreet

#94. 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

#95. A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#96. General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, "Seventh Army didn't cause that destruction, did it, sir?" The man replied, "No sir, that happened in the last war." "What war was that?" "The Second Punic War."5

Robert M. Edsel

#97. A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats.

Harold Holzer

#98. During a mock battle attended by President Warren Harding in 1921, Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler exhumed the arm [of Stonewall Jackson; he didn't believe it was buried there] and reburied it in a metal box.

Tony Horwitz

#99. After Spain, World War II was simple. I wasn't even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.

David T. Dellinger

#100. The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.

Robert Kennedy