All Quotes

"During this period Patton was uneasy and fretful; he padded about his Army like a caged tiger. When a corps commander whom he had disliked as a result of some earlier altercation bivouacked his command in the Third Army sector, George stomped over to the CP for a preliminary inspection. The more he saw of the new headquarters the angrier he became. While making his way through the schoolhouse CP, George tripped over the inert form of a dozing GI. Awakened by Patton's boot in his side, the soldier spluttered in the darkness. "Dammit you blockhead, watch your step. Can't you see I'm trying to sleep?" Patton caught his breath and roared, "Well you're the first silly sonuvabitch around this place that knows what he's trying to do.""

"1945 was also the year when news clips of the Nazi concentration camps first shocked most U.S. citizens, the year when General George Patton, who saw the camps at closer range, likened “this Nazi thing” to “a Democratic and Republican election fight” and privately described the Jews as “lower than animals.”"

"During the same period that Eisenhower was developing his affinity for history, a young blond-haired cadet at West Point by the name of George S. Patton, Jr., was similarly engrossed in the study of history and its consequences. Although the two could not have been more disparate in temperament, Patton's own childhood education in Southern California was dominated by a corresponding passion for history that was the centerpiece of his intellectual life. Like Eisenhower, Patton was tutored on the Bible and could recite passages from memory by the hour. The two studied the same commanders of antiquity but drew different conclusions. In a small black notebook Patton recorded his thoughts, and throughout his colorful military career constantly drew historical parallels to the situation he faced. His frequent exhortation to his soldiers was, "To be a successful soldier you must know history," while Eisenhower regarded the study and practice of history as not only an essential means of learning about war but as the study of the triumph of good over evil. Patton rated the commanders of history by what they accomplished with the forces at their disposal. The "black hats" were those who, in Patton's judgment, failed to measure up or who displayed weakness. Eisenhower never had a great deal to say about Alexander the Great, while Patton scorned him because "in a fit of drunkenness [he] took his own life and his empire fell to pieces.""

"Patton is indispensable to the war effort – one of the guarantors of our victory."

"A great leader for exploiting a mobile situation."

"Patton was convinced that a confrontation with the Soviet Union was bound to come to a head, and he knew the American army was at present superior- his Third Army alone contained nearly half a million combat veterans. "We could beat hell out of them," Patton announced. To a visiting undersecretary of war Patton strongly recommended that the administration not break up the American army at the conclusion of the war in Europe but leave it in place in case the Communists threatened to overrun all of Europe. When the horrified diplomat responded, "You don't realize the strength of these people," Patton scoffed that with the kind of fighting he could give them the Russians might be able to defend themselves up to five days or a week. "After that... if you wanted Moscow, I could give it to you.""

"Germany surrendered, unconditionally, at a minute past midnight, May 8, 1945. By that date Third Army had inflicted 1,486,000 casualties on the Germans, including 144,500 killed, at a cost to themselves of 136,865 casualties, with 21,441 killed in action. According to Colonel Harkins, the Third Army had "gone farther, captured more prisoners, liberated more friendly territory, and captured more enemy territory, than any army ever before in American history." George Patton was the man of the hour and the darling of most of the press."

"At yet another press conference, Patton was asked whether SS prisoners would be treated differently from other German soldiers and made this reply: "Hell, no, SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat [does] in America- that is not to be quoted." But the remark was quoted, and Patton's final self-destruction was set in motion."

"That Eisenhower knew Patton so well, and inhabited a common universe of tactical discourse with him, was one of the more fortunate circumstances of the war. Eisenhower, as a stranger might not have been able to, could see Patton's strength and understand his weakness, preserving him from the consequences of his loudmouth indiscretions for the performance of tasks that no one else could carry out so well as he. We are the better off for that, by many lives and many victories Patton spared others the burden of winning (the present author was a minute quantity among that multitude), and we have Eisenhower to thank. Behind Patton's blood and guts personality was an absolute professional, one of the most competent army commanders our side put into the field; the Germans were painstaking in their analysis of the leaders who faced them in battle, and Patton was the only Anglo-American who seriously troubled them. They could never predict what he was going to do next. Yet it was not in him to accept Eisenhower's magnanimity with good grace; Patton's diaries and letters to his wife reveal his discomfort in references to Eisenhower as "Divine Destiny" and in reflections on how much better the war would be fought if he and not Eisenhower were supreme commander."

"The Bradley name gets heavy billing on a picture of [a] comrade that, while not caricature, is the likeness of a victorious, glory-seeking buffoon … Patton in the flesh was an enigma. He so stays in the film. … Napoleon once said that the art of the general is not strategy but knowing how to mold human nature … Maybe that is all producer Frank McCarthy and Gen. Bradley, his chief advisor, are trying to say."

"If you're a leader, you don't push wet spaghetti, you pull it. The U.S. Army still has to learn that. The British understand it. Patton understood it. I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes."

"Lincoln's remark after they got after Grant comes to mind when I think of Patton – 'I can't spare this man, he fights'."

"The end had finally come for our four all-stars, the greatest group of soldiers to ever serve together in the United States Army, maybe any army, any time. Of the four, George Patton was probably the most gifted pure warrior, although Douglas MacArthur would undoubtedly dispute this claim. Unlike the others, Patton truly loved war, believed he had been fighting them since the time of Caesar, and likely died happily thinking he would be fighting them long into the future. In between, Patton spent his life preparing to fight, and was ready when America needed him, almost the perfect combat general to wage all-out warfare- his mask of command sufficiently awe-inspiring and magnetic enough to induce hundreds of thousands to self-organize around him and become his terrible swift sword. But like some other great actors, his signature role left him typecast and the future held no parts for him. George Patton and the Cold War's gridlock were antithetical, and should he have somehow drifted into politics, a logical enough alliance with Joseph McCarthy is not something America needed. Better he exited the stage when he did."

"I went home and stayed at Green Meadows. A couple of days later we all went up to Boston and the aircraft landed. I'll never forget it. My dad got out of the aircraft and he really looked super; he was fifty-nine years old at the time. WIth him in the aircraft were a couple of division commanders, including John W. O'Daniel, who had lost his son in the Normandy invasion and who later became my commanding general at the Infantry School at Fort Benning when I went through the basic officers course in 1946. Also aboard was Leon Johnson [USAF], who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for the Ploesti Raid, followed by eight or nine noncoms, not one of whom was wearing less than a Silver Star. All of this was followed by a ticker-tape parade through Boston. That evening my father spoke at the Shell on the Esplanade in Boston. We came home that night quite late and the next morning he came upstairs and woke me up and said we were going for breakfast. I ate breakfast with him and then I got on a train and went back to West Point. It was the last time I ever saw him."

"In Tunisia the Americans had to pay a stiff price for their experience, but it brought rich dividends. Even at that time, the American generals showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces, although we had to wait until the Patton Army in France to see the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare."

"I don't think he should have been characterized as the insane show-off that 20th Century-Fox wanted to make him- which I resisted down the line. He had many admirable qualities: duty, honor, country and so forth instilled in those men. The most admirable quality about him was- I have to be so precise in wording this- that he disapproved of taking casualties. Almost fanatical disapproval, and coupled with that, his intense desire to inflict casualties on the enemy."

"To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure I'm what you would have called a real leader. As an Army master sergeant, I certainly had the rank and the authority to tell soldiers what to do, but that alone didn't make me a leader. It takes more than stripes and silver bars to be a leader. There's one thing I do know for certain. You can't be a leader without respect. That's actually how you can tell whether or not a leader is any good. You can tell by how well respected he is by others. General George S. Patton was unquestionably a good leader. He was so good that even his enemies respected him. The same could be said about his principal adversary, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, another leader respected by the soldiers of both camps. Now if that's not leadership, then I don't know what is."

"Profundity must smile."

"Skrattar bäst som skrattar sist."

"Sådan herre, sådan dräng/slav/hund."

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."

"It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men."

"Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained."

"There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else."

"It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems to be so distressingly triumphant."

"I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being."

"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries."

"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown."

"To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism."

"I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?"

"Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!"

"We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side."

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze."

"It is as though something had begun to slip – as though I haven't the firm grip I had on events. – What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie within ourselves. We must hold them firmly – deep within us. For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. One thing follows another, blow after blow – and the man is finished."

"Beauty can pierce one like pain."

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."

"That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life."

"He is no longer with me—by my orders—but then that is merel the carrying-out of an order, after all a kind of negative being-with-me, as he would say. As for any independent life which Bashan might lead without me during these hours—that is not to be thought of."

"Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote."

"The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold."

"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth."

"I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art."

"This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face."

"The deep conviction . . . that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity."

"In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper."

"Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness."

"In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality."

"This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."

"The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity."