Quotes About Authority

We need a commander in chief not a professor of law standing at a lectern - the lectern.

When I first went into the active Army, you could tell someone to move a chair across the room. Now you have to tell them why.

Why then would people look to the United Nations as an instrument of peace, if instead all it is, is an instrument of putting out declarations that nobody intends to take seriously anyway?

One bad general is worth two good ones.

When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!

Silent enim leges inter arma (Laws are silent in times of war).

When one person can initiate war, by its definition, a republic no longer exists.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

Laws are inoperative in war

A war minister is able to force the adoption of any measure desired by the Camp or to block any measure that meets his disapproval.

In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey orders!

Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us; I might say, Priest and Prophet to lead us heavenward; or Magician and Wizard to lead us hellward.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

If there is disturbance in the camp, the general's authority is weak. If the banners and flags are shifted about, sedition is afoot. If the officers are angry, it means that the men are weary.

Upon his royal face there is no note how dread an army hath enrounded him.

Headquarters in the Saddle.

To make certain that crime does not pay, the government should take it over and try to run it.

Bestow rewards without respect to customary practice; publish orders without respect to precedent. Thus you may employ the entire army as you would one man.

Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with a habit.

With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

Lysander said that the law spoke too softly to be heard in such a noise of war.

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.