A collection of quotes on the topic of army, people, war, time.
“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.”
To Leon Goldensohn (14 June 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
https://archive.org/stream/baburnama017152mbp/baburnama017152mbp_djvu.Txt
Describing Mission Command, Lost Victories, The Winter Campaign In South Russia
Source: Industrial and General Administration, 1916, p. 68 ; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 6-7
To Leon Goldensohn (14 June 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Interview, 2 July, 1968; quoted in New York Times, 3 July, 1968, p. 6.
Source: The Rommel Papers (1953), Ch. XXIII : The Sky Has Grown Dark, p. 523.
Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 1, hadith number 2
Sunni Hadith
Babur writing about the battle against the Rajput Confederacy led by Maharana Sangram Singh of Mewar. In Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 547-572.
The Declaration of Independence on the night of 26th March, 1971. The declaration was made minutes before his arrest by the Pakistan Army. http://www.albd.org/autoalbd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=111&Itemid=44 http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=93650 http://web.archive.org/web/20110719125113/http://www.albd.org/autoalbd/images/stories/compile/2006/dia/dia_letter.jpg
Quote, Other
Variant translations
It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best.
Source: The Art of War, Chapter III · Strategic Attack
Source: The Art of War, Chapter XIII · Intelligence and Espionage
“Secret operations are essential in war; upon them the army relies to make its every move.”
Source: The Art of War, Chapter XIII · Intelligence and Espionage
“Where the army is, prices are high; when prices rise the wealth of the people is exhausted.”
Source: The Art of War, Chapter II · Waging War
Source: The Art of War, Chapter XI · The Nine Battlegrounds
Translation by Lionel Giles
Source: The Art of War, Chapter XII · Attacking with Fire
Source: The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution
“History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.”
Radio Address https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/07/03.htm (3 July 1941)
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews
Mekhlis in 1940. Quoted in The People Need a Tsar: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941, by D. L. Brandenberger & A. M. Dubrovsky, 1998
“(In early 1945) We call ourselves the "6th Panzer Army", because we've only got 6 Panzers left.”
Mitcham, Samuel W. (2006). Panzers in Winter: Hitler's Army and the Battle of the Bulge. p. 166.
Dexter Filkins (30 September 2013). "The Shadow Commander" http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/30/130930fa_fact_filkins?currentPage=all. The New Yorker.
"Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
From a leaflet written by Mekhlis in 1941
Source: http://porto-fr.odessa.ua/index.php?art_num=art021&year=2008&nnumb=40
The Race of My Life: An Autobiography Milkha Singh (2013)
R.U.R. (1920)
Source: What I Saw At Shiloh (1881), V
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3
Speech to Red Army personnel, 13 May 1940
Source: http://www.warmech.ru/1941war/sher_4.html
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7; a remark by Boris
Statement after the fall of Poland, as quoted in Legitimacy and Force (1988) by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, p. 49
Source: Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation (2000), p. 246.
“If you give me an army of Turks, I can take the whole world hostage.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
The wars of the past show us that even armies that had won brilliant victories for decades, in some cases were not only defeated but even disintegrated and ceased to exist. Such a fate, for example, befell the army of Napoleon, who for almost two decades kept the whole Europe under its boots. The army needs to instill a spirit of confidence in its power, but not in terms of boasting. Bragging about invincibility brings harm to the army.
Speech to Red Army personnel, 13 May 1940
Source: http://porto-fr.odessa.ua/index.php?art_num=art021&year=2008&nnumb=40
Jerilderie Letter (1879)
Context: It will pay Government to give those people who are suffering innocence, justice and liberty. if not I will be compelled to show some colonial stratagem which will open the eyes of not only the Victoria Police and inhabitants but also the whole British army and no doubt they will acknowledge their hounds were barking at the wrong stump.
§ 6
"Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943)
Context: The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939 was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories, demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modern arms and the others hadn't. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant to foresee that war between Britain and Germany was coming; one could even foretell within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were, and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to stand up to Germany. It is still very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 38
Context: My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can only hope that it has been interesting in the same way as a trivial diary is interesting. … At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.
Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
“Too many kings can ruin an army”
Letter of Instructions to the Captains of the Virginia Regiments (29 July 1759)
1750s
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.
“The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.”
“An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot”
1790s, Agrarian Justice (1797)
Source: Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings
Context: An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.
Then & Now: Jane Goodall (2005)
White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
1962, White Self-Hate: Master-Stroke Of The Enemy
2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)
Statement first attributed in the New York Herald, (September 18, 1863) in response to allegations his most successful general drank too much; as quoted in Wit and Wisdom of the American Presidents: A Book of Quotations (2000) by Joslyn T. Pine, p. 26.
When some one charged Gen. Grant, in the President’s hearing, with drinking too much liquor, Mr. Lincoln, recalling Gen. Grant’s successes, said that if he could find out what brand of whisky Grant drank, he would send a barrel of it to all the other commanders.
The New York Times, October 30, 1863
Major Eckert asked Mr. Lincoln if the story of his interview with the complainant against General Grant was true. The story was: a growler called on the President and complained bitterly of General Grant’s drunkenness. The President inquired very solicitously, if the man could tell him where the General got his liquor. The man really was very sorry but couldn’t say where he did get it. The President replied that he would like very much to find out so he could get a quantity of it and send a barrel to all his Major Generals. Mr. Lincoln said he had heard the story before and it would be very good if he had said it, but he did not, and he supposed it was charged to him to give it currency. He then said the original of this story was in King George’s time. Bitter complaints were made to the King against his General Wolfe in which it was charged that he was mad. “Well,” said the King, “I wish he would bite some of my other Generals then.
Authenticity of quote first refuted in “The Military Telegraph During the Civil War in the United States” by William R. Plum, (1882).
Disputed
Sometimes rendered : "They (the Jews) work more effectively against us, than the enemy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in... It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago, has not hunted them down as pest to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America."
Both of these are doctored statements that have been widely disseminated as genuine on many anti-semitic websites; They are distortions derived from a statement that was attributed to Washington in Maxims of George Washington about currency speculators during the Revolutionary war, not about Jews: "This tribe of black gentry work more effectually against us, than the enemy's arms. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties, and the great cause we are engaged in. It is much to be lamented that each State, long ere this, has not hunted them down as pests to society, and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America." More information is available at Snopes. com: "To Bigotry, No Sanction" http://www.snopes.com/quotes/thejews.htm
This quotation is a classic anti-semitic hoax, evidently begun during or just before World War Two by American Nazi sympathizers, and since then has been repeated, for example, in foreign propaganda directed at Americans. In fact it is knitted from two separate letters by Washington, in reverse chronology, neither of them mentioning Jews. The first part of this forgery are taken from Washington's letter to Edmund Pendleton, Nov. 1, 1779 {and the original can be found in the Library of Congress's online service at http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mgw/mgw3h/001/378378.jpg }. I have tried to reproduce Washington's spelling and punctuation exactly. In that letter Washington complains about black marketeers and others undermining the purchasing power of colonial currency:
: … but I am under no apprehension of a capital injury from ay other source than that of the continual depreciation of our Money. This indeed is truly alarming, and of so serious a nature that every other effort is in vain unless something can be done to restore its credit. .... Where this has been the policy (in Connecticut for instance) the prices of every article have fallen and the money consequently is in demand; but in the other States you can scarce get a single thing for it, and yet it is with-held from the public by speculators, while every thing that can be useful to the public is engrossed by this tribe of black gentry, who work more effectually against us that the enemys Arms; and are a hundd. times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in.
The second part of this fabricated quote is from Washington's letter to Joseph Reed, Dec. 12, 1778 {and can be found at the Library of Congress using the same URL but ending in /193192.jpg}, which again condemns war profiteers (the parenthetical list in the quotation is Washington's own words which he put there in parentheses):
: It gives me very sincere pleasure to find that there is likely to be a coalition … so well disposed to second your endeavours in bringing those murderers of our cause (the monopolizers, forestallers, and engrossers) to condign punishment. It is much to be lamented that each State long ere this has not hunted them down as the pests of society, and the greatest Enemys we have to the happiness of America. I would to God that one of the most attrocious of each State was hung in Gibbets upons a gallows five times as high as the one prepared by Haman. No punishment in my opinion is too great for the Man who can build his greatness upon his Country's ruin.
Misattributed, Spurious attributions
Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.29
Extract from the Orderly Book of the army under command of Washington, dated at Head Quarters, in the city of New York (3 August 1770); reported in American Masonic Register and Literary Companion, Volume 1 https://www.thefederalistpapers.org/founders/washington/george-washington-the-foolish-and-wicked-practice-of-profane-cursing-and-swearing (1829), p. 163
1770s
Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 98-100 (1844)
About
“There is a division of duties between the army and its generals. Eagerness for battle becomes the soldiers, but generals serve the cause by forethought, by counsel, by delay oftener than by temerity. As I promoted your victory to the utmost of my power by my sword and by my personal exertions, so now I must help you by prudence and by counsel, the qualities which belong peculiarly to a general.”
Divisa inter exercitum ducesque munia: militibus cupidinem pugnandi convenire, duces providendo, consultando, cunctatione saepius quam temeritate prodesse. ut pro virili portione armis ac manu victoriam iuverit, ratione et consilio, propriis ducis artibus, profuturum.
Book III, 20; Church-Brodribb translation
Histories (100-110)
xxiv. 15.
Vol. I, Ch. 10: Of the Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)
Swarup, Ram, & Goel, S. R. (1985). Hindu-Sikh relationship. (Introduction by S.R. Goel)
Prologue: Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs.
New millennium, Swimming Across: a Memoir, 2001
Letter to Lord John Russell (13 September 1865), quoted in E. Ashley (ed.), The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston 1846-1865 (London, 1876), pp. 270-1
1860s
Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal, p. 126, Princeton University Press, 1981.
Muqaddimah (1377)
“Mein Führer, who commands The Ninth Army, you or I?”
To Adolf Hitler on 20 January 1942, Wolfsschanze. Quoted in "Generalfeldmarschall Model Biographie" - Page 115 - by Walter Göriltz - 2012
“An army which cannot be reenforced is already defeated.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)
The Moscoviad
Source: The Moscoviad. Yuri Andrukhovych. Spuyten Duyvil, New York City. ISBN1933132523, p. 172
One of two draft letters (25 July, 1938) written for Stanley Unwin to select as a response to his German publishers inquiry about his ancestry. The other letter refused to answer altogether on his ancestry; since the quoted letter persists, it seems that the other letter was sent.
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)
Xu Jehhow:(Biography of Wang Jiaxiang), edition 1996, page 296-297.
On China
Source: "The principles of organization", 1937, p. 90
Die Räuber (The Robbers), Act II (1781)
Creative Evolution (1907), Chapter III. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911, p. 271
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XXI Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.
"The Movement of Movements" (2004) " The Hourglass of the Zapatistas http://books.google.com/books?id=gh052B6W1HYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=movement+of+movements&hl=en&sa=X&ei=sBSVT5CXC4OC8QSUzfSiBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=In%20previous%20armies%2C%20soldiers%20used%20their%20time%20to%20clean%20their%20weapons%20and%20stock%20up%20on%20ammunition.%20Our%20weapons%20are%20words%2C%20and%20we%20may%20need%20our%20arsenal%20at%20any%20moment.&f=false"
Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
About
My Inventions by Nikola Tesla, ISBN 978-1614270843 , p. 45
SM Lee Kuan Yew, Reuters, Jun 6, 1996, which sparked a flurry of protests from Burmese students.
1990s
1850s, Letter to Joshua F. Speed (1855)
Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. xi.
About General U.S. Grant, as quoted in The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln: A Narrative and Descriptive Biography http://www.granthomepage.com/grantgeneral.htm, by Francis Fisher Brown, p. 520
1860s
“An army of sheep, led by a lion, is better than an army of lions, led by a sheep.”
Attributed to Napoleon in Napoleon (1941) by Yevgeny Tarle, this is a variant of an ancient proverb often attributed to many military and political figures, including Alexander the Great, and the even earlier figure Chabrias (Χαβρίας).
Misattributed
“Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.”
Variant translation: Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision
1860s, Letter to James C. Conkling (1863)
“An army ought to be ready every moment to offer all the resistance of which it is capable.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
letter c. 1809, to the Secretary of the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid; as quoted by Robert Hughes, in: Goya. Borzoi Book - Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003; p. 282 & note 13
Goya gave in this way his excuse he gave the Secretary of the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, explaining why he could not be at the inauguration of the portrait, Goya had made of king Ferdinand VII, recently
1800s
Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 2 (p. 22)
Kurland is actually quoting here from Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger
“Englands Schuld,” Illustrierter Beobachter, Sondernummer, p. 14. The article is not dated, but is from the early months of the war, likely late fall of 1939. Joseph Goebbels’ speech in English is titled “England's Guilt.” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb47.htm
1930s
Speech on the 24th Anniversary of the Revolution
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews
