Quotes from Napoleon Bonaparte

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent.

I believe love to be hurtful to society, and to the individual happiness of men. I believe, in short, that love does more harm than good.

Every private in the French army carries a Field Marshall wand in his knapsack.

True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.

Human life is the only thing that takes care of itself.

I haven't known 6 days of happiness in my life.

Revolutions are like the most noxious dungheaps, which bring into life the noblest vegetables.

The life of a citizen is the property of his country.

The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.

Nothing is so contrary to military rules as to make the strength of your army known, either in the orders of the day, in proclamations, or in the newspapers.

There is no strength without justice.

In war, moral factors acount for three quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one quarter.

You become strong by defying defeat and by turning loss into gain and failure to success.

My success and everything good that I have done, I owe to my mother.

Men who have changed the world never achieved their success by winning the chief citizens to their side, but always by stirring the masses.

No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

The battle of Austerlitz is the grandest of all I have fought.

The French complain of everything, and always.

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.