Context: As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist: He is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man.
Gulf War briefing (28 February 1991), as quoted in "WAR IN THE GULF: Commander's Briefing; Excerpts From Schwarzkopf News Conference on Gulf War" in The New York Times
Source: 1840s, Two Ethical-Religious Minor Essays (1849), P. 108
“He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.”
Magnam habet cordis tranquillitatem, qui nec laudes curat, nec vituperia. — Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ (ca. 1418), book II, ch. VI, paragraph 2.
Misattributed
"Pythagorean Ethical Sentences From Stobæus" (1904)
Florilegium
So gewiß ist der allein glücklich und groß, der weder zu herrschen noch zu gehorchen braucht, um etwas zu sein!
Alternative translation: So certain is it that he alone is great and happy, who requires neither to command nor to obey, in order to secure his being of some importance in the world.
Götz von Berlichingen, Act I (1773), p. 39
Source: Goethe’s Works, vol. 3, Götz Von Berlichingen (With the Iron Hand) http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2113&layout=html#chapter_164458
Source: Beautiful thoughts from German and Spanish authors, by C. T. Ramage (1868) https://archive.org/stream/beautifulthough00unkngoog#page/n112/mode/2up
The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)
Context: The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.
“Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is — nor yet so good a Christian.”
The Master of Ballantrae. Mr. Mackellar's Journey (1889).
Valerius Terminus: Of the Interpretation of Nature (ca. 1603) Works, Vol. 1, p. 83; The Works of Francis Bacon (1819) p. 133, https://books.google.com/books?id=xgE9AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA133 Vol. 2
Now this is very different in the case of men, for theirs is a double nature mixed up in one, that of soul and body; the former divine, the latter full of darkness and obscurity: hence naturally arise warfare and discord between the two.
Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)
Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 462 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n931/mode/2up
The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)
