Laconic phrases

"Shortly after taking command of the French 9th Army during the early stages of the First World War, General Ferdinand Foch summarised his situation with the words "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I attack.""

"On October 27, 1917, violinist Mischa Elman and pianist Leopold Godowsky listened in Carnegie Hall as sixteen-year-old violin prodigy Jascha Heifetz gave his first U.S. performance. At intermission, Elman wiped his brow and remarked "It's awfully hot in here", to which Godowsky retorted, "Not for pianists!""

"On October 28, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian emperor Charles I tried to persuade the Slovene leader Anton Korošec not to join an independent Yugoslav State by offering to establish an autonomous United Slovenia within the Habsburg Monarchy. Korošec replied in German: Es ist zu spät, Majestät ("It is too late, your Majesty") and then, according to his own account, slowly left the room. The State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs was declared the next day with Korošec as its de facto leader."

"American President Calvin Coolidge had a reputation in private of being a man of few words and was nicknamed "Silent Cal". A possibly apocryphal story has it that a matron seated next to him at a dinner said to him, "I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you." His reply: "You lose.""

"Nobel Prize-winning British physicist Paul Dirac was notoriously taciturn. This began early. When Dirac was a child, his authoritarian father, a teacher of French, enforced a rule that Dirac speak to him only in French, as a device to encourage him to learn the language. But since young Dirac had difficulty expressing himself in French, the result was he spoke very little. During the question period after a lecture he gave at the University of Toronto, a member of the audience remarked that he hadn't understood part of a derivation. There followed a long and increasingly awkward silence. When the host finally prodded him to respond, Dirac simply said, "That was a statement, not a question." Dirac's colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called a "dirac", which was one word per hour."

"Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli (also a Nobel laureate), known as the conscience of the physics world for his colorful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking, was shown a young physicist's paper and lamented, is so bad,] it is not even wrong.""

"During World War II when Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas refused Axis demands for occupation of Greek territory under threat of war, he was supposed to have replied with a single word—Όχι (Ohi)—"No." The anniversary of his refusal is today celebrated as Ohi Day. Since then it has been reported that his actual response was "Alors, c'est la guerre" ("It's war then", in French)."

"A Lockheed Hudson of 82 Naval Patrol squadron, operating from Argentia in Newfoundland, sighted and attacked a surfaced U-boat on 28 January 1942. After the U-boat submerged undamaged, the mistakenly triumphant pilot, Donald Francis Mason, signaled "Sighted sub sank same"."

"After the sinking of light carrier Shōhō in the May 1942 Battle of the Coral Sea, LCDR Robert E. Dixon radioed "Scratch one flattop" to U.S.S. Lexington, whose commanding officer credited the pilot with coining the standard USN slang."

"During the Battle of Arnhem, Walter Harzer, commanding the near 16,000 strong 9th SS Panzer Division, sent his batman to the massively outnumbered 740 British paratroops holding the north end of the bridge to "discuss terms of surrender". The paras commander, Johnnie Frost replied "Sorry, we don't have the facility to take you all prisoner.""

"Upon hearing that the 101st Airborne division was surrounded in Bastogne by 26 German divisions during the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge, Lt Col Creighton Abrams said: "They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards.""

"During the Battle of Bastogne, the Germans sent the Americans a party of envoys with an ultimatum: surrender or face "certain annihilation". The German officer in charge was perplexed when General Anthony McAuliffe replied with one word: "Nuts!" When the German officer had to ask, "Is the reply negative or affirmative?", it was explained to him as being equivalent to "Go to hell.""

"In the Korean War, after U.N. forces under American command were attacked by Chinese forces in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, U.S. commander Chesty Puller remarked, "We've been looking for the enemy for some time now. We've finally found him. We're surrounded. That simplifies things." He also reportedly said, "Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from every direction.""