Quotes About Napoleon

Ever since the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslim world has been in slow decline relative to the west. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the creeping British annexation of Muslim India, that decline took on a malign aspect.

The idea that Arabia is best run by Arabs is no more palatable to Western leaders today than it was to Napoleon or Churchill.

Napolean is dead - but Beethoven lives.

50 Cent is a master player at power, a kind of hip-hop Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon, von Clausewitz wrote, "We do claim that direct annihilation of the enemy's forces must always be the dominant consideration.... Once a major victory is achieved there must be no talk of rest, of breathing space... but only of the pursuit, going for the enemy again, seizing his capital, attacking his reserves and anything else that might give his country aid and comfort.

Mack había sido capturado una vez y forzado a pasar tres años en Francia, donde había estudiado el estilo bélico de Napoleón.

The moment in Paris where I saluted Napoleon's tomb was one of the proudest of my life.

Maybe you can see from this that I am quite familiar with being in detention. Matter of fact, I feel like I have always been in detention. I am an old veteran of detention, like one of Napoleon's soldiers limping back from the battle of Moscow. No, not like them--they were chumps. More like--one of the girls who died in the Triangle Fire looking out the window and realizing it is too far to jump, then jumping.

But those were Frenchmen and you can work out military problems clearly when you are fighting in somebody else's country. Yes, I replied, when it is your own country you can not use it so scientifically. The Russians did, to trap Napoleon. Yes, but they had plenty of country. If you tried to retreat to trap Napoleon in Italy you would find yourself in Brindiri.

Beethoven is said, however, to have torn out the title page in protest when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, and retitled it the Eroica, dedicating it 'to the memory of a great man' – with the emphasis on memory.

Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain's 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain's 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack.15 The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon's weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

When General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, who was in charge at Saint-Omer (77 letters) reported that it was impossible to embark the entire force in twenty-four hours, Napoleon expostulated, 'Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.

In 1765, four years before Napoleon's birth, the Scottish lawyer and man of letters James Boswell visited the island and was enchanted with what he found. 'Ajaccio is the prettiest town in Corsica,' he later wrote. 'It

Como Primer Cónsul, Napoleón decretó que todos los funcionarios públicos fuesen asalariados al servicio del estado, se preocupó de que estuviesen bien formados, y abolió la promoción basada en la corrupción y el nepotismo, reemplazándola con premios al talento y al mérito.

Napoleon understood "that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because should you find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it."27 Instead, Napoleon openly recognized the worth of enemy units, thereby increasing his troops' morale when they overcame them.

Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769.

Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.' Napoleon, statement in the Moniteur, December 1804

Napoleón dijo en una ocasión que «para entender a un hombre hay que observar cómo era el mundo a sus veinte años».

Thermidorian reaction', led by Barras and Fréron, overthrew Maximilien Robespierre on July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar). Both brothers and sixty other 'Terrorists' were guillotined the next day. Had Napoleon been in Paris at the time he might well have been scooped up and sent to the guillotine along with them.

For a man who was to exhibit such acute political sharpness later in his career, Napoleon completely misread the revolution's opening stages. 'I repeat what I have said to you,' he wrote to Joseph on July 22, a week after the fall of the Bastille, 'calm will return. In a month, there will no longer be a question of anything. So, if you send me 300 livres [7,500 francs] I will go to Paris to terminate our business.

Napoleon's crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested.

Napoleon knew that Alexander the Great had taken learned men and philosophers along on his campaigns in Egypt, Persia and India. As befitted a member of the Institut, he intended his expedition to be a cultural and scientific event and not merely a war of conquest.

Another effect of the heavy rainfall of the night of 17–18 June that worked against Napoleon was the way that it softened the ground, to the extent that cannonballs tended to plough into the mud, rather than bounce along hardened ground. A cannonball fired at sun-baked ground might bounce as many as five or six times, leaving death and carnage in its wake, while one that merely buried itself after its initial impact had only a fraction of that lethal capacity.

Between a battle lost and a battle won,' Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, 'the distance is immense and there stand empires.