Source: Empire of the Sun (1984), p. 6
Context: Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.
“Here they found real war, but they were not ready for it. They were used to easy victories. This deprived them of flexibility on the one hand, of tenacity on the other. For them, war was merely maneuvers. They have neither cavalry nor skiers, their tanks cannot pass over the snow.”
Quoted in "The Tempering of Russia" - Page 120 - by Alexander Samuel Kaun - 1944
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Georgy Zhukov 24
Marshal of the Soviet Union 1896–1974Related quotes

The Times (8 January 1982), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), pp. 852-3
1980s

Section 115
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Speech in the Liverpool Street Station Hotel, London (20 June 1901) on the Boer War, quoted in Speeches by The Earl of Oxford and Asquith, K.G. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1927), p. 40
Opposition MP

“There is neither a foreign war nor a civil war; there is only just and unjust war.”
Source: Les Misérables

“Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.”
Part 2, Section 2, Chapter 12
L'espoir [Man's Hope] (1938)
Context: There are not fifty ways of fighting, there is only one, and that is to win. Neither revolution nor war consists in doing what one pleases.