Quotes About Patton

Patton's personality was a complex one - he was obsessed with glory, but behind the ivory-hilted pistols, the egomania, the forbidding scowl, and the rows of ribbons, there was a much more ambiguous figure.

Patton was being driven in a jeep. Just days before, the silver-haired Seventh Army commander had admitted to a fellow general that the two things he loved most in life were "fucking and fighting.

Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse, The author writes on Eisenhower's cold dismissal of his wartime lover.

Eisenhower and Patton, old friends and figures crucial to the Allies' upcoming success, conferred over yet another gaffe on Patton's part that could have cost him his command. Patton's head is on Ike's shoulder in gratitude, but the scene is rescued from being completely maudlin by Eisenhower's internal question as to whether Patton wears his ever-present helmet to bed.

When General George Patton tried to convince Eisenhower to make a push to conquer the city first, Eisenhower blithely asked, 'Well, who would want it?

But "goin' fratin'" became epidemic, often with cigarettes or chocolate as "frau bait." "To frat" was a synonym for intercourse; non-fraternization was referred to as "non-fertilization." GIs argued that "copulation without conversation is not fraternization," and Patton advised, "Tell the men of Third Army that so long as they keep their helmets on they are not fraternizing

In Field Order No. 1, Patton had advised his commanders, "Attack both by day and night to the limit of human endurance and then continue to attack." For

At one dinner he [George Smith Patton] toasted his officers' wives with the words: 'My, what pretty widows you're going to make.

Posey remembered a story he had heard other soldiers telling about Patton's days commanding U.S. Seventh Army in Sicily in 1943. 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

I'm doing you a favor," replied the colonel with a smile of his own. "Just remember what Patton said: Pressure makes diamonds." "Well, yeah," said the major in amusement. "If you're a lump of coal. If you're a human being, that same pressure turns you into splatter. Like a bug on a windshield.

Patton said: Pressure makes diamonds.

A clear cold Christmas,' Patton wrote in his diary that day, 'lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing Whose birthday it is.' Patton

On Tuesday 26 December, Patton famously boasted to Bradley: 'The Kraut has stuck his head in the meat grinder and I've got the handle.' But this bravado concealed his lingering embarrassment that the advance to Bastogne had not gone as he had claimed it would. He

Though reporters made much of the challenge of keeping up with Patton, he was never far away from the press. (...) Presiding at a ceremony to open the Roosevelt Railroad Bridge near Mainz, he was invited to cut the ribbon with a large pair of scissors. He gave them back demanding 'a goddamned bayonet' adding he wasn't 'a goddamned tailor' - as if anyone in their wildest imagination supposed he might be.

The career high would be putting out a Kids of Widney High CD on my label, Ipecac Recordings.

Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.

As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.

Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude.

The mere thought that the fighting will soon end fills Patton with dread. "Peace is going to be hell on me," he writes to his wife, Beatrice.

Patton, at heart, is a simple man who wears his emotions on his sleeve. This makes him extremely poor at the sort of political posturing at which rivals such as Montgomery excel. The

Your greatest fault," Eisenhower tells Patton, "is your audacity.

Many are convinced that the Second World War will be the war to end all wars, but Patton knows better. As a reminder to himself that war is inevitable, he has been reading Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars each night before bed. The memoir recounts Caesar's battles in Gaul4 and Germany from 58 to 51 BC. The words rise up off the page for Patton, and he feels a personal connection to the action.

It's so dark," Patton says. "So late." He closes his eyes and falls back to sleep.

It is sad and shocking to think that victory and the lives of thousands of men are pawns to the 'fear of They,' and the writings of a group of unprincipled reporters, and the weak-kneed congressmen, Patton wrote in his journal. 'But so it is.