The soldier who has been forced to retreat through no fault of his own loses confidence in the higher command; because he has withdrawn already from several positions in succession he tends to look upon retreat as an undesirable but natural outcome of a battle.
—Field Marshal Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis
People know what they should do and they have the courage and confidence in each other to do it. … They will do anything even though they feel that life and society have dumped all over them; they can still drive on and fight like demons, march like Jackson, and soldier like the very dickens when they have to … it fills me with inspiration. They are truly the great people of this war … the forgotten civilians who will probably never receive their due for their valor on the fields of battle.
—Major Alexander Hottell, 1969 journal entry during the Vietnam War
In no other profession are the penalties for employing untrained personnel so appalling and so irrevocable as in the military.
—General Douglas MacArthur
It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost. In war it is extraordinary how it all comes down to the character of one man.
—Creighton Abrams
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
—George Orwell
The strategist is he who always keeps the objective of the war in sight and the objective of the war is never military and is always political.
—Alfred Thayer Mahan
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
—George Orwell
Anyone who has to fight, even with the most modern weapons, against an enemy in complete command of the air, fights like a savage against modern European troops, under the same handicaps and with the same chances of success.
-Erwin Rommel
War is no longer a series of battles, but a test of strength of the entire nation, its moral strength as well as physical, brain as well as muscles, and stamina as well as courage.
Marshall of the RAF Lord Tedder
The principle of neutrality … has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.
—John Foster Dulles