Military Quotes - Page 65

Whatever the history of U.S. intervention in Iraq, our priorities now should be to protect our people and defend our national security interests, not to try to resolve an intractable religious divide some 1,500 years in the making.

Bring war material with you from home, but forage on the enemy... use the conquered foe to augment one's own strength.

In making tactical dispositions, the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them.

He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

Thus, though I have heard of successful military operations that were clumsy but swift, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.

Therefore I say: know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.

My family thought if I spent time in the military, I'd become more reasonable, a bit calmer. But I've always been extreme in what I do - both as a believer and a nonbeliever.

So [Donald ] Trump gave a speech on national security and military affairs to a military-themed audience in Philadelphia, and there was no vulgarity in it. There was no bombast. There wasn't any of the usual Trump braggadocio. It was a teleprompter speech, but it was serious, studious, and it represented a solid understanding of issues and of the status quo.

Wars results in immediate deaths and destruction, but the environmental consequences can last hundreds, often thousands of years. And it is not just war itself that undermines our life support system, but also the research and development, military exercises and general preparations for battle that are carried out on a daily basis in most parts of the world. The majority of this pre-war activity takes place without the benefit of civilian scrutiny and therefore we are unaware of some of what is being done to our environment in the name of 'security.

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.

When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails. But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like nails.

And as a child I was filled with passionate admiration for acts of civic courage I had seen performed by an elderly military doctor, who was a friend of my family.

Our profession is built on the bedrock of trust - the trust that must inherently exist among Soldiers, and between Soldiers and their leaders to accomplish their mission in the chaos of war. Recent incidents of sexual assault and sexual harassment demonstrate that we have violated that trust.

On 9/11, 2001, the Navy stood at 316 ships. By 2008, after one of the great military buildups in American history, we were at 278 ships and had 49,000 fewer sailors.

To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will.

The warrior's gift is to willingly storm Hell that Heaven may remain unstained.

European peace movement felt that the deployment of these missiles on European soil, on German soil would be a very great danger towards the Soviet Union in that those missiles could reach the Soviet Union, make it vulnerable within five to six minutes, that it could surgical strikes, strikes into the military infrastructure and that a strike into the military infrastructure could cause in fact World War III, an atomic world war and that this could also be used for first strike, for surgical search, first strike into the Soviet Union.

When you talk about the security and safety of average Americans it doesn't do average Americans a lot of good to expand America's military footprint if the daily lives of average Americans are being undermined by the fact that we're no longer able to compete in a global economy. I think that's the kind of human security we have to pay more attention to.

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.

I am convinced that the best service a retired general can perform is to turn in his tongue along with his suit and to mothball his opinions.

The American people are going to judge the majority party here today. If they go out here and vote for this rule that allows this provision to be stricken, they are voting against the men and women in the military of our country.

The men with stars on their shoulders supporting gays serving in the military is going to have a profound impact.

American imperialism has suffered a stunning defeat in Indochina. But the same forces are engaged In another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people. Here, the prospects for success are much greater. The battleground is ideological, not military. At stake are the lessons to be drawn from the American war in Indochina; the outcome will determine the course and character of new imperial ventures.