X

Sort by

Quote length

Sentiment

Change font

Change background

Military Historian Inspirational Quotes (290)

Page 1 of 13
Filter & Style
Image
It's a necessary quality of a diplomat or a politician that he will compromise. Uncompromising politicians or diplomats get you into the most terrible trouble.
John Keegan
Image
We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff — the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow- brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn't hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.
John Keegan
Image
The Communists claim that they liberated the Russian people. Yet, when the Great Patriotic War began, these same Russians greeted their foreign invaders with tears, with flowers and with enthusiastic hospitality. What can have brought them to the point at which they would greet even Hitler as their saviour and liberator?
Viktor Suvorov
Image
Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.
Viktor Suvorov
Image
In the future as in the past, both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu will undoubtedly have a lot to offer.
Martin Van Creveld
Image
War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off but smitten down. You may then spare him every exaction, relinquish every gain, but „til then he must be struck incessantly and remorselessly.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Image
The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Image
Whether they will or not, Americans must now begin to look outward. The growing production of the country demands it.
Alfred Thayer Mahan
Image
By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.
Adrian Goldsworthy
Image
In his fifty-six years he was at times many things, including a fugitive, prisoner, rising politician, army leader, legal advocate, rebel, dictator – perhaps even a god – as well as a husband, father, lover and adulterer. Few fictional heroes have ever done as much as Caius Julius Caesar.
Adrian Goldsworthy
Image
Politics is the womb in which war develops.
Carl von Clausewitz
Image
The hydrogen bomb is not the answer to the Western peoples' dream of full and final insurance of their security ... While it has increased their striking power it has sharpened their anxiety and deepened their sense of insecurity.
B. H. Liddell Hart
Image
An Army is still a crowd, though a highly organized one. It is governed by the same laws, and under the stress of war is ever tending to revert to its crowd form. Our object in peace is so to train it that the reversion will become very slow.
J. F. C. Fuller
Image
An army should always be so distributed that its parts can aid each other and combine to produce the maximum possible concentration of force at one place, while the minimum force necessary is used elsewhere to prepare the success of the concentration.
B. H. Liddell Hart
Image
Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.
Paul Fussell
Image
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
Image
The spring of 1942 was given over to a very impassioned, strategic debate about where we should first attack in counterpunching against the Germans and Italians. The British argued very persuasively on the part of Winston Churchill, prime minister, that this was a very green American Army, green soldiers, green commanders.
Rick Atkinson
Image
I don't think that what's going on in Bosnia is political activity. It's partly political, but it's partly atavistic as well.
John Keegan
Image
One learns more from defeat than from victory.
Samuel Eliot Morison
Image
In war, while everything is simple, even the simplest thing is difficult. Difficulties accumulate and produce frictions which no one can comprehend who has not seen war.
Carl von Clausewitz
Image
The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.
John Keegan
Image
The predominance of moral factors in all military decisions. On them constantly turns the issue of war and battle. In the history of war they form the more constant factors, changing only in degree, whereas the physical factors are different in almost every war and every military situation.
B. H. Liddell Hart
Image
Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.
Paul Fussell
Image
Beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the [American] nation was going to go on growing-in size, in power, in everything a man could think of-and in that belief there was a might and a fury that would take form instantly at the moment of shock.
Bruce Catton
Previous
Next