Military Quotes - Page 35

• The Book of Revelation has all the authority, in these theological uplands, of military orders in time of war. The people turn to it for light upon all their problems, spiritual and secular.

  H. L. Mencken

  Spiritual, War, Book

  4 Copy quote

• Mentioning God in the Pledge of Allegiance is no different in kind than allowing government salaried Chaplains for the military or for the Congress, or including the official motto, In God We Trust, on our currency.

  Orrin Hatch

  Government, Scary, Different

  8 Copy quote

• It's hard for me to sympathize with a young person who chooses to go into the military because they know where they're going. I think we need to start depopulating the military.

  Henry Rollins

  Thinking, Needs, Young

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You may be very mad at some guy that walked away with a huge golden parachute, but that really isn't the important thing. I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.

  Howard Warren Buffett

  Mean, Mad, Guy

  "Warren Buffett: I Haven't Seen As Much Economic Fear In My Adult Lifetime - Charlie Rose Interview". Interview with Charlie Rose, www.cnbc.com. October 1, 2008.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• My father had been in the military and he was a weapons specialist, so he had an affinity for weapons but also for the discipline of it. He taught us how to shoot when we were young. He opened up karate schools in the worst parts of the city, on purpose, and then he would systematically clean out a three-block radius, all of the gang-bangers and drug dealers and everybody of nefarious character.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Block, Father, School

  Interview with Joseph Hooper, www.elle.com. April 15, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

  Marquis de Sade

  War, Ideas, Progress

  Sade (marquis de), Marquis de Sade (1987). “The 120 days of Sodom and other writings”, Grove Pr

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

  Malcolm Forbes

  Beach, War, Moving

  18 Copy quote

• It is a damned sight easier to start wars than to end them. This truth has been stated for as long and as often as it has been ignored. High time and thank God, we are at least moving toward de-escalation in Vietnam. The road to extrication will be long, painful, bitter. But it must be trod. We are so bogged down in Vietnam that we cannot respond effectively anywhere else in the world to a military power play except through atomic bombardment.

  Malcolm Forbes

  War, Moving, Sight

  4 Copy quote

• The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Death, Country, Responsibility

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.139, Cambridge University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

  Thomas Jefferson

  War, Men, Two

  Thomas Jefferson, Joyce Appleby, Terence Ball (1999). “Jefferson: Political Writings”, p.279, Cambridge University Press

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Stillertook part in the Spanish Civil WarIt is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined--a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.

  Max Frisch

  Civil War, Gestures, Common

  4 Copy quote

• Personal prudence, even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations, surely is no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse, the honest sense of duty, is the first.

  Herman Melville

  Selfish, Men, Special

  Herman Melville (1966). “Billy Budd”, p.14, Hayes Barton Press

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still -- that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.

  Charles Kingsley

  War, Rain, Clouds

  Charles Kingsley (2008). “Out of the Deep: Words for the Sorrowful: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.9, ReadHowYouWant.com

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or forms of government or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the psalmist described as a little lower than the angels ... or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man's destiny.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Struggle, Fall, Angel

  43 Copy quote

• Although military, economic and political strength certainly favors the more powerful side, the matter of simple justice is a counterbalancing factor.

  Jimmy Carter

  Powerful, Simple, Justice

  4 Copy quote

• It seems that certain transcendental realities emit rays to which the masses are sensitive. That is how, for example, when an event takes place, when at the front an army is in danger, or defeated, or victorious, the rather obscure news which the cultivated man does not quite understand, excite in the masses an emotion which surprises him and in which, once the experts have informed him of the actual military situation, he recognizes the populace's perception of that "aura" surrounding great events and visible for hundreds of kilometers.

  Marcel Proust

  War, Army, Reality

  6 Copy quote

• Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Life, Death, War

  Men at War introduction (1942)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch -- engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.

  A. Bartlett Giamatti

  Time, Jobs, War

  5 Copy quote

• I don't fly any awards at the house. Any award you get is usually for something you've done in the past. And I like to keep looking forward.

  Garth Brooks

  War, Past, History

  4 Copy quote

• People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

  Norman Mailer

  War, Moving, Past

  Norman Mailer (1972). “Existential errands”, Signet

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

  Herbert Butterfield

  War, History, Historical

  7 Copy quote

• What, then is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Life, War, Anger

  Nikos Kazantzakis (2012). “Report to Greco”, p.578, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The price works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time.

  Milton Friedman

  Time, War, Wells

  Milton Friedman, Rose Friedman (1990). “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Menof cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.

  David Hume

  Reflection, Sublime, Merit

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.521, Delphi Classics

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• But having made my decision as Commander-in-Chief based on what I am convinced is our national security interests, I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.

  Barack Obama

  Government, Long, People

  "Obama at War". "Frontline", www.pbs.org.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source