Douglas MacArthur, address to a joint session of Congress, April 19, 1951, Congressional Record, vol. 97, p. 4125. According to The Home Book of Quotations, ed. Burton Stevenson, 9th ed., p. 2298h, col. 2 (1964), this is a line from a soldier's parody of a nineteenth century gospel hymn, "Kind Words Can Never Die". The parody was known at West Point where MacArthur was graduated in 1903. However, since the earliest printed version of the song "Old Soldiers Never Die" is found in the London publihttps://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Soldiers