Battles Quotes
So, there lies the brave de Kalb. The generous stranger, who came from a distant land to fight our battles and to water with his blood the tree of liberty. Would to God he had lived to share its fruits!
Shortly, we will be fighting our way across the Continent of Europe in battles designed to preserve our civilization.
This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.
Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.
I have fought sixty battles and I have learned nothing which I did not know at the beginning.
The secret of great battles consists in knowing how to deploy and concentrate at the right time.
You have won battles without cannon, crossed rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes, camped without brandy and often without bread. Soldiers of liberty, only republican phalanxes [infantry troops] could have endured what you have endured.
My true glory is not to have won 40 battles; Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories. But what nothing will erase, what will live forever, is my Civil Code.
It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.
Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general the more he contributes in maneuver the less he demands in slaughter.
Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.
We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.
Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy.
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