Battle Quotes - page 45

The barbarian chieftain, who defended his country against the Roman invasion, driven to the remotest extremity of Britain, and stimulating his followers to battle, by all that has power of persuasion upon the human heart, concludes his exhortation by an appeal to these irresistible feelings - "Think of your forefathers and of your posterity." (John Quincy Adams)
I have seen soldiers panic at the first sight of battle, and a wounded squire pulling arrows out from his wound to fight and save his dyinghorse. Nobility is not a birth right but is defined by one's action. View quote
Kevin Costner
The price of freedom is the willingness to do sudden battle anywhere, any time and with utter recklessness. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
Around this time Siward, the mighty earl of Northumbria, almost a giant in stature, very strong mentally and physically, sent his son to conquer Scotland. When they came back and reported to his father that he had been killed in battle, he asked, "Did he receive his fatal wound in the front or the back of his body?" The messengers said, "In the front." Then he said, "That makes me very happy, for I consider no other death worthy for me or my son." View quote
Henry of Huntingdon
The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the power of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus. View quote
Don Miller (author)
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. View quote
William James
By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder -- infinitely prouder -- to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, ''Our Father Who Art in Heaven.'' View quote
Douglas MacArthur
In a racially diverse society, it makes sense to phase out state sanction for the battle flag - as South Carolina governor Nikki Haley advocated yesterday, in calling on the state legislature to vote for the removal of the battle flag that has been flying over the grounds of the state capitol... View quote
Victor Davis Hanson
The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is. View quote
Umberto Eco
Such people can say with pride: T never lost a battle.' On the other hand, they will never be able to say: T won a battle.' View quote
Paulo Coelho
The battle to save life is still going on. (Ba Jin)
This battle to save life will eventually be won. View quote
Ba Jin
They were engaged in a battle to save lives and as the scope of the battle became wider an increasing number of people were drawn in. View quote
Ba Jin
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost. View quote
Henry David Thoreau
In the excitement and rigours of the game or battle with words and shapes, self-interest is mislaid and objective truth may often be revealed. View quote
Vernon Scannell
Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won: the bravery of my troops hitherto saved me from the greater evil; but to win such a battle as this of Waterloo, at the expens of so many gallant friends, could only be termed a heavy misfortune but for the result to the public. View quote
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. View quote
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won. View quote
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Next to a lost battle, nothing is so sad as a battle that has been won. View quote
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost. View quote
Friedrich Hayek
Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right-the right to life-and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time. If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom-then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect? (Ayn Rand)
If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and ... if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own I would refuse.... I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. View quote
Ayn Rand
For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbours between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it. View quote
Ayn Rand
In fighting nature, man can win every battle except the last. If he should win that too, he will perish, like an embryo cutting its own umbilical cord. View quote
Thor Heyerdahl
I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. View quote
Vladimir Lenin