Generals Quotes

“A man must know his destiny… if he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder… if he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it.”
― George S. Patton Jr.

“Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“War is too important to be left to the generals”
― Georges Clemenceau

“Brave' covers everything from complete insanity and bloody disregard of other people's lives - generals tend to go in for that sort - to drunkenness, foolhardiness, and outright idiocy - to the sort of thing that will make a man sweat and tremble and throw up . . . and go and do what he thinks he has to do anyway.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood

“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

“At present, a good many men engaged in scientific pursuits, and who have signally failed in gaining recognition among their fellows, are endeavoring to make reputations among the churches by delivering weak and vapid lectures upon the 'harmony of Genesis and Geology.' Like all hypocrites, these men overstate the case to such a degree, and so turn and pervert facts and words that they succeed only in gaining the applause of other hypocrites like themselves. Among the great scientists they are regarded as generals regard sutlers who trade with both armies.

Surely the time must come when the wealth of the world will not be wasted in the propagation of ignorant creeds and miraculous mistakes. The time must come when churches and cathedrals will be dedicated to the use of man; when minister and priest will deem the discoveries of the living of more importance than the errors of the dead; when the truths of Nature will outrank the 'sacred' falsehoods of the past, and when a single fact will outweigh all the miracles of Holy Writ.

Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?

When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then, and not until then, will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher, become a real and blessed truth.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses

“Those who cannot conquer must bend the knee. They must find strength, or serve those of us who have. You are my generals. I will send you out: my hunting dogs, my wolves with iron teeth. When a city closes its gates in fear, you will destroy it. When they make roads and walls, you will cut them, pull down the stones. When a man raises a sword or bow against your men, you will hang him from a tree. Keep Karakorum in your minds as you go. This white city is the heart of the nation, but you are the right arm, the burning brand. Find me new lands, gentlemen. Cut a new path. Let their women weep a sea of tears and I will drink it all.”
― Conn Iggulden, Khan: Empire of Silver

“The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell's ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter's in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals. If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms.”
― Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline

“It's war that makes generals”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

“There could be no doubt, so I was finally forced to decide, that the longer one dealt with them, the more one developed the habit of treating generals like members of the opposite sex; specifically, like ladies no longer young, who therefore deserve extra courtesy and attention; indeed, whose every whim must be given thought.”
― Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement

“Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles.”
― Sherwood Anderson, A Story Teller's Story

“Anyone can act strategically, it doesn’t take much to make a plan. The skill of a general is his or her ability to react strategically when plans fail.”
― Lance Conrad, The Price of Loyalty

“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

“What is that statue?" I asked. "A Civil War general--probably Lee's," Amzie said. "What else is on the courthouse lawn?" The statue stood on one side of the entrance and a beautiful tree on the other. "What kind of tree is that?" I asked. "I don't know for sure," Amzie replied, "but I think it's an oak. Big, ain't it? Strong, too. Been there a long time."

For a moment he sat still and full of thoughts. "Let's look around town," I said. "Wait," he replied. "You just gave me a thought. There's a picture of the South if I ever saw one. That Southern general and that tree. One is the dead past and the other the living present. This South is sure caught in between--between life and death.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Iraq had forced massive changes to the Army's equipment, training, and strategy. But the most important legacy of the war had been cultural. The war had upended most of the service's basic assumption about how it should fight, undermining the Powell Doctrine with its emphasis on short, intense wars not replacing it with anything nearly so straightforward. Chiarelli wasn't sure he could predict what the next war would look like. But he knew what kind of officers would be needed. He wanted an officer corps that argued, debated, and took intellectual risks. Even that laudable goal was far from accepted within the Army.”
― David Cloud, The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army

“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, The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-08

“Plot and plan like all good generals.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Vocation of a Gadfly

“Generals whom go into the grind of war exclusively to expand their war chests will find their adulation for battle waning whenever the fiscal costs rise or the security of their being is in jeopardy. Soldiers steeped in the warrior’s cult do not panic when the tide of battle turns. Faced with the possibility of experiencing a great loss, a warrior’s resolve hardens and they become invincible. A warrior never asks how many resources the opposition mustered, only when and where they will fight. At his darkest hour, digging into the deepest sockets of their fissured souls, the warrior summons his prodigious strength to meet their opponent head on. The true warrior’s actual opponent is never his greatest nemesis. A warrior’s greatest enemy is the armchair generals whom at the first sign of danger cut and run or make imprudent decisions that leave the fighting warriors abandoned and alone.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Tell me something less significant,
Something about our biology, for instance,
About what you hear while sitting under the tree,
About lonely lions in the prairies;
Forget decorated generals;
Tell me about Private Ryan's,
Tell me something only you know
And make a new friend.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realization that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street towards the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Bismarck's generals needed little persuasion of their own superiority. They were confident or their troops. For four years, since Sadowa, they had been rearing, preparing, planning. As generals always did, they wanted more time. But when time ran out, they would be ready.”
― David Ball, Empires of Sand by David Ball