“Changing from the defensive to the offensive, is one of the most delicate operations in war.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Source: On War (1832), Book 6, Chapter 1.
“Changing from the defensive to the offensive, is one of the most delicate operations in war.”
Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
“Are we not acting on the defensive when we respond to the blows which we receive from above?”
Auguste Vaillant (1861–1894) French anarchist
Speech before the French Chamber of Deputies, 1894
“A view of the unseemly actions of drunken men is the most effectual dissuasive from wine.”
Anacharsis Scythian philosopher
As quoted in Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Chapter "Life of Anacharsis", 1702 edition, John Nicholson, p. 55
Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman
Speech in the House of Commons (2 March 1790), quoted in Loren Reid, Charles James Fox: A Man for the People (1969), p. 261.
1790s
Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace
Bk. IX, ch. 1
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)
Context: In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist
Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment