Quotes About Napoleon

Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed.

By the time Napoleon abandoned his army to its fate in Poland - arriving back in Paris on 5 December - it numbered fewer than 10,000 effectives. It was a disaster from which he would never recover.

But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness he said, lay in working

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

War as Napoleon knew it just not possible any more. However, we're very unlikely to accept or recognize 'world peace' even when we get it.

How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

Und bald sollte die tiefe Unwahrheit jenes Wortes an den Tag kommen, das Napoleon in Erfuhrt zu Goethe gesprochen: Die Politik ist das Schicksal. Nein, der Geist ist das Schicksal und Schicksal ist Geist. Das Wesen des Geistes aber ist die Freiheit.

Faced with this endless British troublemaking, Napoleon was, in Bonapartist French eyes, like a kung fu master, meditating peacefully on his prayer mat about progress and democracy while a gang of irritating English boys threw acorns at him, finally forcing him to get up and give them a slap.

Napoleon recalled his dismay at seeing 'mountains of swirling red flames, like huge ocean waves, exploding up into the sky of fire, then sinking into the sea of flames below'.

Napoleon's aides broadcast the news to the people that the Emperor had covered the 1,000 kilometres from Dresden in only four days. In other words, he had broken the world retreating record, vive l'Empereur.

It was Napoleon who said that one spy in the right place was worth twenty thousand men in the field. He was speaking of his own spy, Schul-meister, a man of amazing courage, skill, and loyalty. But when the time came to reward Schulmeister for his services it was the same Napoleon who refused him the Legion of Honor for which he had been recommended, and the same Napoleon who commented that money was the only suitable reward for

Denied a Lenin and deprived of Napoleon, France retreated into the last and, we must hope, indestructible redoubt, the world of Astérix . The postwar vogue for Parisian thinkers barely concealed their collective retreat into Hexagonal introversion and into the ultimate fortress of French intellectuality, Cartesian theory and puns.

Buonaparte has often made his boast that our fleet would be worn out by keeping the sea and that his was kept in order and increasing by staying in port; but know he finds, I fancy, if Emperors hear the truth, that his fleet suffers more in a night than ours in one year.

I wouldn't mind an original letter from Napoleon to Josephine - in the early days, his letters arrived torn to pieces because he was overwhelmed by his passion for her.

I'm known for having crazy shoes. I have a total Napoleon complex - I'm only 5'4", and every heel I have is four inches or more.

These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

I have a great longing for trousers, and if I ask you in time maybe you can put in a little sequence with the trousers? Maybe her dressed as soldier, going to Napoleon's tent at night or something. I'm sorry not to contribute anything more but it is merely to remind you about the trousers. Trousers - girls in trousers. Pressed trousers. Girls. Trousers, trousers.

A wise person once said that the past cannot be changed. Only the future is in our power." "I prefer what Napoleon said. If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Napoleon, that exponent of martial glory, sniffed at England as "a nation of shopkeepers." But at the time Britons earned 83 percent more than Frenchmen and enjoyed a third more calories, and we all know what happened at Waterloo.15

El maldito Bonaparte la embarró al mejor tiempo: expiró su imperio y nos dejó en los cuernos del toro».

Napoleon might have understood Dwight D. Eisenhower, who fought not even a hundred and fifty years after Waterloo. But I don't think Eisenhower could even begin to wrap his mind around drone warfare, spy satellites, or any of the technology that now defines the security of our world.

Antisemitism first flared up in Prussia immediately after the defeat by Napoleon in 1807, when the "Reformers" changed the political structure so that the nobility lost its privileges and the middle classes won their freedom to develop.

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.' Napoleon

There are certain historical figures of such importance that we need to know everything about them, which is why books about Napoleon, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, and the great religious founders continue to proliferate; these lives require constant reevaluation and interpretation.