I am in favor of deliberately spreading methodically prepared bacteria among people and animals -- mildew ... to destroy the harvests, anthrax to destroy horses and livestock, and the plague, in order to kill not only entire armies, but also the inhabitants of large regions.
After landing his invasion forces on the shores of some country, the sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes would immediately burn his own boats. He was sending his army a message: "We can't turn back. Either we succeed here or we die here." Excuses were not an option.
In a nonviolent army, the general and the officers are elected, or are as if elected, when their authority is moral and rests solely on the willing obedience of the rank and file.
Send me 300 francs; that sum will enable me to go to Paris. There, at least, one can cut a figure and surmount obstacles. Everything tells me I shall succeed. Will you prevent me from doing so for the want of 100 crowns?
No rent-roll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation: and the first point of courtesy must always be truth, as really all the forms of good-breeding point that way.
An army's bravest men are its cowards. The death which they would not meet at the hands of the enemy they will meet at the hands of their officers, with never a flinching.
What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not...the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army...our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms...
The builders of the British Indian Empire have patiently built its four pillars-the European interests, the army, the Indian princes and the communal divisions.
Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.