J. F. C. Fuller quotes

What thrust us into war were not Hitler's political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear. (J. F. C. Fuller)
The War of the Roses in England and the Civil War in America were both intestinal conflicts arising out of similar ideas. In the first the clash was between feudalism and the new economic order; in the second, between an agricultural society and a new industrial one. Both led to similar ends; the first to the founding of the English nation, and the second to the founding of the American. Both were strangely interlinked; for it was men of the old military and not of the new economic mind - men, such as Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh - who founded the English colonies in America. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
It is absolutely true in war, were other things equal, that numbers, whether men, shells, bombs, etc., would be supreme. Yet it is also absolutely true that other things are never equal and can never be equal. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
In the World War [WW1] nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
Air warfare is a shot through the brain, not a hacking to pieces of the enemy's body. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
To me our bombing policy appears to be suicidal. Not because it does not do vast damage to our enemy, it does; but because, simultaneously, it does vast damage to our peace aim, unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob, always demented and the second a king, generally sane. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
An absolute doctrine is impossible, for once a doctrine and its articles become dogma, woe to the army which lies enthralled under its spell. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
In 1919 I was the sole person who saw war in the form it would be; yet saw it only as an acorn and not as an oak. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
Everyone was talking and chatting, when slowly came into sight the first tank I ever saw. Not a monster but a very graceful machine with beautiful lines....Here was the missing tool of penetration, the answer to the dominance on the battlefield of small-arms fire. View quote
J. F. C. Fuller
Fuller's finest wartime moment was the promulgation of his Plan 1919. Believing World War I would continue into 1919, he suggested victory with a single penetrating, surprise, mass tank attack aimed not at killing lots of German soldiers but at reaching and killing the enemy "brain”-the rear-area command-and-communications infrastructure-and thus paralyzing the body. But Fuller's most meaningful tactical concept came to naught, as the war ended in November 1918. Had it continued, Fuller today might be as widely known as Guderian, Montgomery and Patton. (J. F. C. Fuller)