Quotes About Napoleon

The four walls of the living redoubt had fallen, hardly could a quivering be detected here and there among the corpses; and thus the French legions, grander than the Roman legions, expired at Mont-Saint-Jean on ground soaked in rain and blood, in the somber wheatfields, at the spot where today at four in the morning, whistling, and gaily whipping up his horse, Joseph drives by with the mail from Nivelles.

Napoleon was accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate, Thou wilt not dare.

the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season sufficed to make a world crumble. The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven o'clock, and that gave Blücher time to come up. Why? Because the ground was wet.

Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus Christ is the man-God.

What is Waterloo? A victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

Reeking blood, overcrowded cemeteries, weeping mothers—these are formidable plaintiffs. When the earth is suffering from a surcharge, there are mysterious moanings from the deeps that the heavens hear. Napoleon had been impeached before the Infinite, and his fall was decreed. He annoyed God. Waterloo is not a battle; it is the changing face of the universe.

You may have the worst timing since Napoleon decided the dead of winter was the right moment to invade Russia.

Along with all those books about Lincoln, Obama might read some biographies of Napoleon. The general who established the Legion d'Honneur understood that people fought as much for medals as for morals.

Napoleon - the people who were becoming Napoleon's generals realized that for him, it was not about spreading freedom and revolution; it was about creating a new empire with Napoleon the dictator or the emperor.

He [Napoleon] was as great as a man can be without morality.

stranded Napoleon in Egypt, which

According to what he tells us himself, Mrs. Fryxell used to say of Napoleon: 'I wish he could be punished for all his slaughter by having to go through a childbirth for every human being who was shot on his account'. (A. Fryxell: Min historias historia).

That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men.

Y hay una mujer detrás del mostrador; preferiría leer su historia verdadera antes que la centésima quincuagésima vida de Napoleón o el septuagésimo estudio de Keats y su uso de la inversión miltoniana que en este momento están redactando el viejo profesor Z y sus homólogos.

Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis's recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be "more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.

I have the greatest respect for General Buonaparte, as every soldier must. But he will make out of Egypt a catastrophe for France. The Revolution has but one enemy, England. And the place to strike England is close to her home.

The loss of the battle of Waterloo was the salvation of France.

Napoleon said that if it weren't for religion the poor would kill the rich. This may be all you needed to know about any human community. The churches were the real police stations, the real keepers of law and order.

Cobb's well-deserved reputation as a bibliophile (he couldn't resist biographies of Napoleon) sometimes resulted in him receiving books instead of trophies or flowers.

Camera and event. Since its invention, film has seemed destined to make history visible. It has been able to portray the past and stage the present. We have seen Napoleon on horseback and Lenin on the train. Film was possible because there was history. Almost imperceptibly, like moving forward on a Moebius strip, the side was flipped. We look on and have to think: if film is possible, then history too is possible.

Napoleon embodied a new way of fighting wars: a combination of individual genius and mass organization, and objectives far more ambitious than those of his predecessors.

What Frederick shared with Napoleon—and what later theorists celebrated in both—was the ability to create strength on the battlefield, even without an overall numerical advantage, and direct it against an enemy's vulnerabilities.

As this required a comprehensive defeat, Napoleon had little interest in indirect strategies. When a point of weakness was found, extra forces would be poured in to break through.

acabó sepultado en Waterloo en 1815.