Quotes About Generals

Still, the day-to-day work even within I.S.I.'s less secretive directorates could be very different from that of the military, because of the strict compartmentalization of information. An officer would not have any idea what the man in the next office was doing. Information was telescoped to the top, where only the most senior generals had complete visibility.

The Coalition Support Funds provided a kind of legal bribery to Pakistan's generals. Musharraf and his lieutenants could use the cash for legitimate military purposes, or they could spread it around as they wished.

Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades.

Anyone can practice some nonviolence, even soldiers. Some army generals, for example, conduct their operations in ways that avoid killing innocent people; this is a kind of nonviolence.

No fool stays in power for years on end when there are so many generals, sons, and wives waiting in the wings to launch a coup.

They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.

In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times—it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army—that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.

But whatever the civilian structure, let our people hereafter entrust military affairs to its trained generals, and insist that politicians keep hands off the war machine.

Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph; killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith: their compassion will be true.

We can see, now, that the social background of the Empire makes wars of conquest impossible for it. Under weak Emperors, it is torn apart by generals competing for a worthless and surely death-bringing throne. Under strong Emperors, the Empire is frozen into a paralytic rigor in which disintegration apparently ceases for the moment, but only at the sacrifice of all possible growth.

We can see, now, that the social background of the Empire makes wars of conquest impossible for it. Under weak Emperors, it is torn apart by generals competing for a worthless and surely death-bringing throne. Under strong Emperors, the Empire is frozen into a paralytic rigour in which disintegration apparently ceases for the moment, but only at the sacrifice of all possible growth.

If the thumbnail version of the Iraq war was that Bush lied about WMD, the thumbnail version of Obama's war in Afghanistan is that the generals pushed him into a war he didn't want to fight.

War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.

Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.

Napoleon wanted his generals to be lucky. I don't think he would have worked with me.

In 1836, the Lydia, a Nantucket whaleship, was struck and sunk by a sperm whale, as was the Two Generals a few years later.

There are no good wars or bad wars. The only thing bad about a war is to lose it. All wars have been fought for a so-called good Cause on both sides. But only the victor's Cause becomes history's Noble Cause. It's not a matter of who is right or who is wrong, it's a matter of who has the best generals and the better army!

Like so many other French generals in the Peninsula, he was soon to find that victory is not the same thing as conquest.

Time after time, as I and my fellow generals saw that our strategies weren't working, we failed to reconsider our basic assumptions. We failed to question our flawed understanding of our foe or ourselves . . . In the end, all the courage and skill in the world could not overcome ignorance and arrogance. As a general, I got it wrong. And I did so in company with my peers.

Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.

The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

War is much too important a matter to be left to the generals.

I am not making spiteful assertions now but merely stating the facts-that, for instance, among Hungarian generals there is such a considerable percentage of men of German origin, who of course had, in most cases, to alter their names if they wanted to get anywhere.