Quotes About Generals

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.

Sadly, I have very vague memories of Burma. The family was forced to leave when the generals took over.

Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history. Until World War II, more victims of war died of war-borne microbes than of battle wounds. All those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were often merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies.

the author Leo Tolstoy, who maintained that leaders and generals had minimal influence on the course of history. To make his point, Tolstoy included in his novel War and Peace fictitious accounts of battles in which generals issue orders, but the orders are irrelevant to what is actually happening on the battlefield.

I like generals. I like Napoleon. I like strategy. The majority of them are praised for mass destruction, but it's exciting to see how it comes to the mind mentally.

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

We've had enough of the generals and movie stars. We want to hear about the ordinary people.

They have destroyed your weapons," he had told the generals, in effect. "But these weapons would in any case have become obsolete before the next war. That war will be fought with brand-new ones, and the army which is least hampered with obsolete material will have a great advantage.

Statesmen in a crisis, like generals or admirals in war, have often to take fateful decisions without knowing a very large proportion of the essential facts. It is hard to do this, but anything is better than not taking decisions at all.

I have seen despicable rhetoricians beloved by the most famous orators, and persons who knew nothing of war live in familiarity with great generals. But

Generals have gone to war with far less deliberation than she gave to the choice between the pear tart or the vanilla soufflé.

When I first met Mandela, we did not discuss anything of substance; we just felt each other out. He spent a long time expressing his admiration for the Boer generals and how ingenious they were during the Anglo-Boer war.

It is not the business of generals to shoot one another.

politicians only listened to these generals, and these generals only listened to themselves.

Many a Hitler decision – decisions that infuriated his generals by their seeming lack of logic at the time – can probably be explained by the work of Göring's Forschungsamt, Ribbentrop's ministry and the naval staff's cryptanalysis branch.

His generals were ready; his sons were. It remained to be seen whether the Arab nations were ready to meet them in war. In their arrogance, they had invited annihilation.

It began to seem that the generals had got us into something they had no business doing.

It is a fact that the Left routinely resists, then as now: Americans fought and died in Vietnam for freedom, just as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Whatever mistakes generals and policymakers have made along the way cannot detract from that essential truth - which should be a part of any reliable history.

The Continental army got more generals than they got private soldiers, these days. An officer lives through more 'n two battles, they make him some kind of general on the spot. Now, gettin' any pay for it, that's a different kettle of fish.

It's going to be hard to stop this process. The generals are itching for a fight.134 They want to go." The message that Khrushchev took from Dobrynin's account was that if this crisis continued to escalate, Kennedy might well face a coup.

Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?

Tired of a bureaucracy that tied their hands with absurd rules of engagement and a system that, as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling famously noted, imposed harsher punishments on privates who lost rifles than on generals who lost wars, Raife didn't look back. He left the SEAL side of his life behind and dropped off the radar.

It was still dangerous to disagree with Stalin. This fact was disastrous for the war effort. His generals were terrified of telling him bad news; it was safer to lie. For the first several months of the Great Patriotic War, therefore, he often didn't know the real strategic situation. Even worse, military experts couldn't question his amateur civilian judgment without fear of death.

Few Allied generals can have hated each other more than Patton and Montgomery.