Military Quotes

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Robert Frost

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

Terry Pratchett

Drinking is the soldier's pleasure.

John Dryden

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized than a cannonade; scents nothing but the stink of battle-wounds and blood.

Sean O'Casey

War is too important a matter to be left to the military.

Georges Clemenceau

Iconic clothing has been secularized. A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative color and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

Angela Carter

How happy is the sailor's life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.

Isaac Bickerstaffe

I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the mariner, and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him, that would refuse to set his hand to a rope, but I know there is not any such here.

Sir Francis Drake

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be never so vile. This day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

William Shakespeare

'Tis the soldier's life to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.

William Shakespeare

The nation which forgets its defenders will be itself forgotten.

Calvin Coolidge

I want to see you shoot the way you shout.

Theodore Roosevelt

I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.

Oliver Cromwell

Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?

Daniel Daly

When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind

George Bernard Shaw

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

Albert Einstein

This death's livery which walled its bearers from ordinary life was sign that they have sold their wills and bodies to the State: and contracted themselves into a service not the less abject for that its beginning was voluntary.

Thomas E. Lawrence

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Groucho Marx

The greatest general is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

Napoleon Bonaparte

I made all my generals out of mud.

Napoleon Bonaparte