"Man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."

Jean Paul Sartre

"Man is born free, but everywhere in chains."

J J Rousseau

"War is taking the pressure off the Russians" [WWII]

Ralph

"No plan survives contact with the enemy."

Moltke

"A little revolution now and then is a good thing."

Napoleon

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke

"However conceived in an image of the world, foreign policy is a phase of domestic policy, an inescapable phase." A Foreign Policy For America

Charles Beard

"History since the end of the Second World War in 1945 has been dominated by two great developments: as the Western democracies have withdrawn from empire, turning their former colonial territories into independent nations, the communist powers have created new empires, turning previously independent peoples into colonial satellites."

18.10.87 Sunday Times Editorial

"The hammer shatters glass but forges steel."

Russian proverb

"War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil."

George Orwell

"It is one thing to shout for peace, but quite another to encourage the obvious enemy by saying in advance that you won't fight in any circumstances."

Maurice Oldfield

"Fighting is to war what cash payment is to trade, for however rarely it may be necessary for it actually to occur, everything is directed towards it, and eventually it must take place all the same and must be decisive."

Engels, paraphrasing Clausewitz

"Never shout about your work: know how to function"

Cheka Agents' guide, 1918

"When an order is given in the Army today it is the objective which is defined, rather than the precise means of attaining it."

Army Training Regiment Winchester, Maj. Brown

"Arms are my ornaments, warfare my repose." Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

"War is simply turning the soil. Peace is each new harvest." Crossfire p. 412.

" The virtue of war is that there's no time for anyone to have a past." Crossfire p. 203.

Mike Bond

"The army turned out to be just what he was looking for. It encouraged his belief that his path through life was fated to be more richly landscaped than the tiresome asphalt turnpike his fellows travelled." Underground Empire p. 135.

" I liked the army, the pomp and circumstance, but I would not want to spend my life doing it. There's not much room for ingenuity in the army." DEA Agent Dick Mangan. Underground Empire p. 173.

James Mills

"The difference between the professional and the conscript-based army is that the former half-train their officers and then give them to a highly-trained sergeant to finish off officer training. The latter, lacking in long-service sergeants, train their officers to the point where they can train the sergeants." N°113, August 1996, p.94.

British Army Review

"All wars are a species of acquisitive activity."

Aristotle

HISTORICAL MILITARY QUOTATIONS

"Fifty years were spent in the process of making Europe explosive. Five days were enough to detonate it." Sarajevo in The Real War 1914-1918

Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart

"I think it very uncivilized of you to invade British territory. You are here illegally." to an Argentine officer, 1982.

Her Britannic Majesty's Governor Rex Harrison of the Falkland Islands

" In Flanders' fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row."
read full poem text (In Flanders' Fields)

John McCrae

" The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

Sir Edward Grey

"'Peace upon earth !' was said. We sing it,
And pay two million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison gas." [1924]

Thomas Hardy

"In my eyes it was not Austria fighting to get a little satisfaction out of Serbia, but Germany fighting for her life." Mein Kampf

Adolf Hitler

"Of Athenians: in the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life and they lost it all - security, comfort and freedom. When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."

General Omar Bradley

"What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our nation is turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'." (18.06.1940)

"It is no use saying 'we are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary."

"I remember that a fortnight or so before the last war, the Kaiser's friend Herr Ballin, the great shipping magnate, told me that he had heard Bismarck say towards the end of his life, If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.' The murder of the Archduke of Sarajevo in 1914 set the signal for the First World War. I cannot conceive that the elements for a new conflict do not exist in the Balkans today. I am not using the language of Bismarck, but nevertheless not many Members of the new House of Commons will be content with the new situation that prevails in those mountainous, turbulent, ill-organized and warlike regions." 16.08.1945

"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; without victory, there is no survival."

"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."

Winston Churchill

" The peace-at-any-price party would leave an unarmed Europe a prey to Russia." (1867)

Karl Marx

"I believe it is peace for our time. " September 1938

Neville Chamberlain

"To keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down." Of NATO in 1950s (Secretary General)

Lord Ismay

"If the cavalry were not very valuable in trench warfare, they did bring a little social tone to the battlefield."

Desmond Morton

"No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: 'Come back with your shield or on it.' Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome."

Robert Heinlein

"Their training is very simple: you just stick a cattle prod up their ass and teach them to play cards. It's just a question of voltage."

"In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the enemy is war itself."

"We're here to preserve democracy, not practice it."

characters in the film Crimson Tide

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees." Speaking against Franco's Fascists during the Spanish Civil War, 3 Sep 1936

Dolores Ibarruri

"The evacuation of the beaches was a magnificent bit of organisation but it has gone down in history that the whole of the British Expedition Force came off on Dunkirk beaches which is nonsense. 30 000 to 40 000 men were evacuated from the beaches by the "little ships" which was a very magnificent effort. It was however a drop in the ocean compared to the evacuation by the Royal Navy and the Merchant Navy from the jetty of some 220 000 men." The Navy: 1939 to the present day, Max Arthur

Lt Bruce Junor, RN

"After the fall of Crete, 815 Sqn was sent to Cyprus with orders to fly a daily reconnaissance to Rhodes to get warning of any seaborne attack on Cyprus from there. The then defences of Cyprus consisted of 3 Hurricanes and a batallion of Sherwood Foresters, but the threat disappeared when the Germans invaded Russia on 22.06.1941." in The Navy: 1939 to the present day, Max Arthur

Lt Michael Torrens-Spence, RN

"As we steamed through the convoy ... a paragraph from some naval action orders kept going through my mind, idiotically, 'The ship's company should change into clean underwear before going into action so that wounds are not contaminated..'" The Navy: 1939 to the present day, Max Arthur

Lt Cdr Roger Hill, RN

"We have built a bridge of ships from England to France" (on D-Day)

Admiral Cunningham

"My sea had been black; black and grey with great lumps of roaring white water crashing over our bows to rush swilling along the lurching deck. Often I had stood, gloved hands gripping a rail or a stanchion, just gazing, awed by this immense world of black and brutal water. Northern waters had been our lot, and from the Western Isles of Scotland we had sailed out through the Atlantic, the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the Pentland Firth, the Skagerrak, the Kattegat, the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia. Nippy it had usually been, with rough weather the main feature, but there had been times of stillness, times of friendship, times of thoughtfulness, vigorous times, uncertain times, hilarious times and tomes of wonder and great beauty." in The Navy: 1939 to the present day, Max Arthur

Able Seaman Peter O'Toole RN

"Moral elements are among the most important in war. They consitute the spirit that permeates war as a whole, and at an early stage they establish a close affinity with the will that moves and leads the whole mass of force, practically merging with it, since the will is itself a moral quantity. Unfortunately they [moral elements] will not yield to academic wisdom."

von Clausewitz

"I will shake your hand,sir, because of your position. But this hand is stained with the blood of my son." His son Thomas, a lance corporal, was killed in Iraq

Reg Keys