“If you are going through hell...keep going.”
Winston Churchill

“War and politics, you can't have (the first) one without the other.”
D. R. Eberhart

“The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow.”
William Dean Howells, Silver Wedding Journey

“Preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns.”
William Dean Howells, American Literary Centers

“Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”
Duke of Wellington (in a dispatch in 1815)

“Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.
Franklin D. Roosevlet

“I've got to go to meet God - and explain all those men I killed at Alamein.”
Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery in 1976.

“I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts.”
Bob Kerry (told to The New York Times)

“They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist....”
General John Sedgwick, Union Commander, d. 1864 Killed in battle during US Civil War

“I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.”
Charles De Gaulle (his reply when compared to Robespierre)

“It is unpleasant business to eject a skunk, but someone has to do it.”
Chicago Tribune Editorial Board

“We will either find a way or make one.”
Hannibal

“I never advocated war except as a means of peace.”
Ulysses S. Grant

“It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”
Robert E. Lee

“I am tired and sick of war, its glory is all, moonshine . . . war is hell.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman

“There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman, August 1880.

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, address to his troops D-Day 1944

“Another such victory and we are undone.”
Pyrrhus

“In war there is no substitute for victory.”
General Douglas MacArthur

“Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn....In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, honor, country.”
General Douglas MacArthur, Thayer Award Speech to cadets of the U.S. Military Academy on May 12, 1962.

“We are not retreating—we are advancing in another direction.”
General Douglas MacArthur

“Men will not fight and die without knowing what they are fighting and dying for.”
General Douglas MacArthur

General Douglas MacArthur addressing an audience of 50,000 at Soldier's Field. The General, on his first visit to the United States in 14 years, April 1951. Chicago, Illinois. (National Archive photograph).

“Never give up!”
Sir Winston Churchill

“Nothing in life is as exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“The Americans will always do the right thing... After they've exhausted all the alternatives.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”
Sir Winston Churchill

“Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix.”
Georges Clemenceau

“War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.”
Georges Clemenceau

“When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honor the charge they made!
Honor the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!”
Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade

“C'est magnifique, main ce n'est pas la guerre.”
(It is magnificent, but it isn't war.)
Pierre Françoise Joseph Bosquet, French Marshall in the Crimea, on the charge of the Light Brigade, 1854.

“No bastard ever won a war dying for his country. You win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
General George Patton

“Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”
General George Patton

“Know thy lot, Know thine enemies, Know thyself.”

“Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred battles.”
Sun Tzu Wu

“Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: (1) He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. (2) He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. (3) He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all the ranks. (4) He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. (5) He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by his sovereign. Victory lies in the knowledge of these five points.”
Sun Tzu Wu, Art of War

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger by Ian L. Fleming

“The whole art of war consists in getting at what is on the other side of the hill.”
Duke of Wellington

Home •War Poetry • Author's Biography • Artist's Notes
• Reviews/Critiques • Maps • Order Books • Links • Look Back
• War Quotations • 42nd Rainbow Gallery • Free Vintage Clipart • Site Contents