Great Throughts Treasury

"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bullshit. Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. You are here today for three reasons. First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones. Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else. Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight."

"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't."

"My men don't surrender. I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he has been hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight back."

"My men can eat their belts, but my tanks have gotta have gas."

"Never draw a gun on a man unless you intend to kill him. And believe me, if you do intend to kill him he will already know it. Then he will feel the cold breath of the tomb."

"Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men."

"Never let the enemy pick the battle site."

"Never tell people how to do things."

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

"No good decision was ever made in a swivel chair."

"Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired. When you were younger the mind could make you dance all night, and the body was never tired... You've always got to make the mind take over and keep going."

"No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage."

"Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more"

"Now in war we are confronted with conditions which are strange. If we accept them we will never win. Since being realistic, as in mundane combats fistic. We will get a bloody nose and that's a sin."

"Of all the many talks I had in Washington, none gave me such pleasure as that with you. There were two reasons for this. In the first place, you are about my oldest friend. In the second place, your self-assurance and to me, at least, demonstrated ability, give me a great feeling of confidence about the future … and I have the utmost confidence that through your efforts we will eventually beat the hell out of those bastards — "You name them; I'll shoot them!""

"Prisoner of War guard companies, or an equivalent organization, should be as far forward as possible in action to take over prisoners of war, because troops heated with battle are not safe custodians. Any attempt to rob or loot prisoners of war by escorts must be dealt strictly with."

"Pressure makes diamonds"

"Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable."

"Perpetual peace is a futile dream."

"Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are and probably more so. They are not supermen"

"Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!"

"Say what you mean and mean what you say."

"Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some it takes an hour. For some it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor his sense of duty to his country and his innate manhood."

"Some goddamn fool once said that flanks have got to be secure. Since then sonofabitches all over the globe have been guarding their flanks. I don't agree with that. My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me. Before he finds out where my flanks are, I'll be cutting the bastard's throat."

"Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate, because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy."

"Tanks are new and special weapon-newer than, as special, and certainly as valuable as the airplane."

"Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom."

"Take not counsel of your fears."

"Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!"

"Success demands a high level of logistical and organizational competence."

"Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

"The difficulty in understanding the Russians is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them, except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other Asiatic characteristics, the Russian have no regard for human life and is an all-out son of bitch, barbarian, and chronic drunk."

"The leader must be an actor."

"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

"The obvious thing for the cavalryman to do is to accept the fighting machine as a partner, and prepare to meet more fully the demands of future warfare."

"The more I see of Arabs the less I think of them. By having studied them a good deal I have found out the trouble. They are the mixture of all the bad races on earth, and they get worse from west to east, because the eastern ones have had more crosses."

"The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country"

"The test of success is not what you do when you are on top. Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom."

"The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!"

"There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily. All because one man went to sleep on the job. But they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before they did."

"The publicity I have been getting, a good deal of which is untrue, and the rest of it ill considered, has done me more harm than good. The only way you get on in this profession is to have the reputation of doing what you are told as thoroughly as possible. So far I have been able to accomplish that, and I believe I have gotten quite a reputation from not kicking at peculiar assignments."

"There are three ways that men get what they want: by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning or thinking. Then you must have well trained troops to carry it out: that's working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown. That unknown spells defeat or victory; success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks. I call it God. God has His part or margin in everything. That's where prayer comes in."

"There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear."

"There is no such thing as luck, merely opportunity meeting preparedness."

"There is only one sort of discipline, perfect discipline."

"There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again... You can look him straight in the eye and say, Son your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son of a Goddamned Bitch named Georgie Patton."

"This individuality stuff is a bunch of bullshit."

"There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is to use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wound, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time."

"To be a successful soldier, you must know history."

"There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates."