Greatest Military Quotes

Peace through strength works. We've got the greatest military in the world. I want them to dominate any potential conflict.

As Americans, we have shown ourselves to have the greatest military on the face of the planet, but we are not so very good at anticipating threats and appreciating just how difficult it is to build up stable democracies, to make the investments and sustainable development that we must as a nation if we are to attack the root causes of these sorts of instability.

What would you do differently as defense secretary to compensate for this record in which the greatest military in the world, as we are constantly told, doesn't get the job done?

I would rank George Washington as America's greatest president, but he only had to defeat what was then the world's greatest military power with a ragtag group of irregulars and some squirrel guns, whereas Ronald Reagan had to defeat liberals.

If you can't get them to salute when they should salute and wear the clothes you tell them to wear, how are you going to get them to die for their country?

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

Know the enemy and know yourself.

If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle

The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

We have met the enemy and they are ours.

Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes! Then fire low!

Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

I don't understand what the president's [Donald Trump] position is on Russia. But I can tell you what my position is on Russia: Russia is a great danger to a lot of its neighbors, and [Vladimir] Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Among the men who fought on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

The scale and grandeur of the Russian effort mark it as the greatest military achievement in all history.

It is not the critic who counts...The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

It is not the critic who counts

So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense. Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.