Spoken by George C. Scott in the film Patton.
Variants:
No man ever won a war by dying for his country. Wars were won by making the other poor bastard die for his.
You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.
War is not meant to be you dying for your country-it is by making the other bastard die for his.
Misattributed
“I am the bastard child of an unholy union between fascism and Stalinism. I am the contemporary of a strange twilight when the clouds above are dissolving amid the clash of arms and the cries of the tortured. The only revolution I know, the one which may grant notoriety to this century, is the Nazi plague and red fascism. Hitler did not die in Berlin. Conqueror of his conquerors, he won the war in the stormy night into which he plunged Europe. Stalin did not die in Moscow nor at the Twentieth Congress. He is here among us, a stowaway in the history that he still haunts and bends to his mad will. You say the world is doing well? It's certain in any case that it keeps on going, since it isn't changing. But never before has the will to death become so nakedly and cynically unleashed. For the first time the gods have left us, no doubt weary of wandering on the plain of ashes where we have made our home. And I am writing in an age of Barbarism which is already, silently, remaking the world of men.”
Source: Barbarism with a Human Face (1977), p. ix
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Bernard-Henri Lévy 2
French film director and philosopher 1948Related quotes
“Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union.”
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (1968), Dangers, Police Dictatorships
Context: Fascism lasted twelve years in Germany. Stalinism lasted twice as long in the Soviet Union. There are many common features but also certain differences. Stalinism exhibited a much more subtle kind of hypocrisy and demagogy, with reliance not on an openly cannibalistic program like Hitler's but on a progressive, scientific, and popular socialist ideology.
This served as a convenient screen for deceiving the working class, for weakening the vigilance of the intellectuals and other rivals in the struggle for power, with the treacherous and sudden use of the machinery of torture, execution, and informants, intimidating and making fools of millions of people, the majority of whom were neither cowards nor fools. As a consequence of this "specific feature" of Stalinism, it was the Soviet people, its most active, talented, and honest representatives, who suffered the most terrible blow.
Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 6
Speech at the Baquedano Theater, Santiago, Chile (1953) https://web.archive.org/web/20101222183523/https://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc1011/nsc1011.pdf
Speeches, Moscow Address
[The Real Face of Atheism, 2004, 9780801065118, 3293056M, http://books.google.com/books?id=0SD0mYaYz3sC&pg=PA25&dq=%22in+his+book+Modern+Times%22, 25]
2000s
'Why I am a Liberal', News Chronicle (4 April 1934), quoted in Kenneth O. Morgan, Michael Foot (Harper Perennial, 2008), p. 30
1930s
Essays, ed. by H.Kurzke, Frankfurt 1986, vol. 2, p. 311