B: Bailey – Byron – Military Quotes and Quotations
“Threats without power are like powder without ball.”
– Nathan Bailey
“If you’re not gonna pull the trigger, don’t point the gun.”
– James Baker
“let’s roll”
Todd M. Beamer last words on 9-11-01
“We ain’t making no goddamn cornflakes here.”
– Col. Charlie Beckwith, founder of Delta Force
“Will screw them hard, fast, and in an elegant manner.”
Major General Haim Bar-Lev prior to the 1967 war (he was a General at the time).
“The difficulties of peace are better than the agony of war.”
Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin on Independence Day 1979
“Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.”
– Julien Benda
“All war represents a failure of diplomacy.”
– Tony Benn
“If we fight a war and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia”
– Hans Albrecht Bethe
“Coward: one who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs”
– Ambrose Bierce
“Next stop Kuwait! We’re going to go fast and go violently!”
– Lieutenant-General Walter E. Boomer, 15 February 1991.
To his staff shortly before Desert Storm
“Every plan of campaign ought to have several branches and to have been so well thought out that one or other of the said branches cannot fail of success.”
– Bourchet
“A soldier is he whose blood makes the glory of the general.”
– Adapted from Henry G. Bohn
“War is like love; it always finds a way”
– Bertolt Brecht
“I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.”
– H. Rap Brown, press conference 1967
“Every man is his own greatest enemy, and as it were his own executioner.”
– Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682
“The thanks of the infantry, in my opinion, must be treasured more by every artilleryman than all decorations and citations. ”
– Colonel Georg Bruchmuller
Imperial German Army Artillery Officer and Father of Modern Fire Support
“The onset of bayonets in the hands of the valiant is irresistible”
– Major-General John Burgoyne, 1777
“Success can not be administrated”
– Admiral Arleigh Burke, 1962
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke (1729-1797), British statesman and philosopher
(May originally have been said by Plato)
“I want to record my strong conviction that the risks entailed by nuclear weapons are far too great to leave the prospects of their elimination solely within the province with governments.”
– General Lee Butler, USAF 1961-94.
(Commander-in-Chief of United States Strategic Command. Planning and operational responsibilities for all U.S. strategic nuclear forces. Also served as a member of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons)
“The terror-filled anesthesia which numbed rational thought, made nuclear war thinkable and grossly excessive arsenals possible during the Cold War is gradually wearing off. A renewed appreciation for the obscene power of a single nuclear weapon is taking a new hold on our consciousness, as we confront the nightmarish prospect of nuclear terror at the micro level.”
– General Lee Butler
“We are not condemned to repeat the lessons of forty years at the nuclear brink. We can do better than condone a world in which nuclear weapons are enshrined as the ultimate arbiter of conflict. The price already paid is too dear, the risks run too great. The nuclear beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste. The task is daunting but we cannot shrink from it. The opportunity may not come again.”
– General Lee Butler
“What, then, does the future hold? How do we proceed? Can a consensus be forged that nuclear weapons have no defensible role, that the political and human consequences of their employment transcends any asserted military utility, that as weapons of mass destruction, the case for their elimination is a thousand fold stronger and more urgent that for deadly chemicals and viruses already widely declared illegitimate, subject to destruction and prohibited from any future production? I believe that such a consensus in not only possible, it is imperative ad is in fact growing daily.”
– General Lee Butler
“The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.”
– Sir William Francis Butler
“What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.”
– Lord Byron (1788-1824)
“He makes a solitude, and calls it – peace!”
– Lord Byron
“He who loves not his country can love nothing.”
– Lord Byron
I can’t guarantee that these quotations are correct or true, but I have tried to verify as many of the quotes as possible. Please contact me if you find any errors in the quotes, have some additional information about the quotes or if you know any more quotations that are not listed here.
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