Military Quotes Mark Cancian – Henry P. Crowe

C: Cancian – Crowe – Military Quotes and Quotations

“The side with the simplest uniforms wins.”
– Major Mark Cancian

“War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.”
– Thomas Carlyle

“The General Order is always:
……To manoeuver in a body and on the attack.
……To maintain strict but not pettifogging discipline.
……To keep the troops constantly at the ready.
……To employ the utmost vigilance on sentry go.
……To use the bayonet on every possible occasion.
And to follow up the enemy remorselessly until he is utterly destroyed.”
– Lazare Carnot (1753-1823)
French revolutionary, military strategist.
(First Order of the Day, 2 Feb. 1794, to army commanders.)

“I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.”
– Fidel Castro

“If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.”
– Fidel Castro

“The revolution… is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.”
– Fidel Castro

“I have only two men out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold. ”
– 1.Lt. Clifton B. Cates
USMC. In Belleau Wood, 19 July 1918

“Have you not got your bayonets?”
– Sir George Cathcart, November 1854.
At Inkerman when word came that his division was low on ammunition.

“However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that…”
– Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1938)
about the conflict between Germany and Czechoslavkia

“We would fight not for the political future of a distant city [Danzig], rather for principles whose destruction would ruin the possibility of peace and security for the peoples of the earth.”
– Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

“We have preserved peace in our time.”
– Neville Chamberlain

“Wars, conflict, its all business. One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify.”
– Charlie Chaplin

“I make war on the living, not the dead.”
– Charles V
(when advised to hang Martin Luther’s corpse on the gallows)

“Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right… is in the one man who commands them.”
– Gilbert Chesterton
(“Thoughts Around Koepenick”)

“Marriage is an adventure, like going to war”
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“As to the field of battle it is the abiding of the dead. And he who decides to die will live, and he who wishes to live will die.”
– Wu C’hi (421-381 BC)

“Attacking does not merely consist in assaulting walled cities or striking at an army in battle array; it must include the art of assailing the enemy’s mental equilibrium.”
– Li Ching (571-649 C.E.)

“He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened. He who conquers others has physical strength. He who conquers himself is strong.”
– Tao-te Ching

“Laws are inoperative in war”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.): Pro Milone.

“I prefer the most unjust peace to the most righteous war”
– Cicero

“Without supplies neither a general nor a soldier is good for anything”
– Clearchus, 401 BC.
Spartan officer, celebrated as the leader of the Ten Thousand.

“War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military.”
– Georges Clemenceau

“I don’t know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war.”
– Georges Clemenceau

“Being in the army is like being in the Boy Scouts, except that the Boy Scouts have adult supervision.”
– Blake Clark

“The truth is that the fall of Napoleon is the hardest blow that our taxing system ever felt. It is now impossible to make people believe that immense fleets and armies are necessary.”
– William Cobbett

“Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind.”
– William Collins

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
– Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924

“The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.”
– Calvin Coolidge, (1872-1933)

“Now I recall the Recon Marines ragged, filthy cammie shirted young men in green paint who move silent like the fog with deadly purpose in their eyes. Swift, Silent, Deadly. I smile.”
– GYSGT Correll, USMC, Retired Recon Marine

“Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Lets go inland and be killed.”
– Brigadier-General Norman Cota: Omaha Beach, 6 june 1944.

“We are outnumbered, there is only one thing to do. We must attack!”
– Admiral Andrew Cunningham, 11 November 1940.
Before attacking the Italian fleet at Taranto

“We must conquer war or war will conquer us”
– Ely Culbertson

“The combination of professionalism and technology may also result in narrow-minded specialization more suited to a debating society than to an organization whose task it is to cope with, and indeed live in, the dangerous and uncertain environment of war.”
– Martin van Crevald, military historian

“The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of ‘targets’ to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting.”
– Martin Van Creveld

“You’ll never get a Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole! Follow me!”
– Capt. Henry P. Crowe, USMC. Guadalcanal, 13 January 1943

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.
Submit your own quotes/quotations in our quotes forum