Quotes & Sayings About Bayonets

The laurels of victory are at the point of the enemy bayonets. They must be plucked there ; they must be carried by a hand-to-hand fight if one really means to conquer. — Ferdinand Foch

In reality, at the end of World War II, America imposed democracy at the point of a bayonet on Japan and Germany, and it has proved a resounding success in both countries. The problem with liberals is that they never give bayonets a chance. — Dinesh D'Souza

You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw — Vladimir Lenin

The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers ... — Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Where the hell do you put the bayonet? — Chesty Puller

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon - authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire ... — Friedrich Engels

The bullet is a fool, the bayonet is a fine chap. — Alexander Suvorov

Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets — G.H. Hardy

If humankind - from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women - if they knew what profound inner pleasure awaits those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace. — Camille Flammarion

When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

All the hideously calculated hypocrisy of men when they commit a murder in the name of justice. Then it's the time of death on a grander scale, the hour of the great offenses - fix your bayonets boys - gentlemen, synchronize your watches - in ten seconds time the barrage starts, ... a thousand men are destined to die in order to capture a farmhouse no one has lived in for years. — Peter Ustinov

How would anyone believe that any good was to be obtained by adding the Balkan states to the already unwieldy Dual Monarchy and so increasing the Empire to a hundred million souls with differing cultures and traditions? Of course armies could be recruited and young men could die, but great States evolved only through centuries of social tradition and mutual self-interest; they were not imposed by bayonets. To believe the contrary would be as mad as the folly which had put the Archduke Maximilian on the throne of Mexico. — Miklos Banffy

Great revolutions are the work rather of principles than of bayonets, and are achieved first in the moral, and afterwards in the material sphere. — Giuseppe Mazzini

I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets — Napoleon Bonaparte

The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh. — Amadeo Bordiga

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets. — Ludwig Von Mises

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe. — George Will

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home
all the more powerful because forbidden
terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. — Winston S. Churchill

My brothers and sisters of America, there is not the least shadow of hope that India can ever be Christianised. After two hundred years of vain efforts and of spending millions of dollars with the prestige of the conqueror and backed by British bayonets, Christianity is not supported by the converts themselves. Every bit of Protestant Christianity in India is maintained partly by the money flowing from England and America, and partly by taxes imposed upon the Hindus against their will, which must be paid although the people starve.
The people of India as a whole are saturated with religious and philosophical thought. They think and ponder on spiritual matters from childhood to death. Even the street-sweeper is frequently more profoundly versed in subtle metaphysics and divine wisdom than the missionary sent to convert him. — Virchand Gandhi

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. — Thomas Hardy

More dangerous than bayonets and cannon are the weapons of the mind. — Ludwig Von Mises

Practically all we know is that thousands of native Haitians have been killed by American Marines, and that many of our own gallant men have sacrificed their lives at the behest of an Executive department in order to establish laws drafted by the Assistant Secretary of the Navy ... I will not empower an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to draft a constitution for helpless neighbors in the West Indies and jam it down their throats at the point of bayonets borne by US Marines. — Warren G. Harding

By push of bayonets, no firing until you see the whites in their eyes! — Andrew Agnew

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village. — Charles Dickens

He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let's keep our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and respect. — George S. Patton

Chamberlain raised his saber, let loose the shout that was the greatest sound he could make, boiling the yell up from his chest: Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! Fix bayonets! Charge! He leaped down from the boulder, still screaming, his voice beginning to to crack and give, and all around him his men were roaring animal screams, and he saw the whole Regiment rising and pouring over the wall and beginning to bound down through the dark bushes, over the dead and dying wounded, hats coming off, hair flying, mouths making sounds, one man firing as he ran, the last bullet, last round. — Michael Shaara

The guards were making a butcher shop out of the stairways. There was a hail of blows with chains, bayonets, and truncheons. They were breaking heads and arms. — Armando Valladares

Cross-examination is the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth. You can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. A lawyer can do anything with cross-examination if he is skillful enough not to impale his own cause upon it. — John Henry Wigmore

One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry. — Virginia Woolf

All the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement, — Strom Thurmond

A Bayonet's contrition is nothing to the dead. — Emily Dickinson

Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another. — Voltaire

Women have plenty of roles in which they can serve with distinction: some of us even run countries. But generally we are better at wielding the handbag than the bayonet. — Margaret Thatcher

You can do everything with bayonets, but you are not able to sit on them — Otto Von Bismarck

I found Elvis on the Internet, I went camping with a young cadet, he showed me his bayonet. — Mary Chapin Carpenter

Let us thank God that we live in an age when something has influence besides the bayonet. — Daniel Webster

The war is for the family. The battle for their children's education and their grandchildren's freedom is as real to them as if they could witness the clangs of bayonets on the field or hear the blasts of mortars in the harbor. — Oliver DeMille

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets. — George Orwell

The onset of bayonets in the hands of the valiant is irresistible. — John Burgoyne

When I went through Marine boot camp in Paris Island, South Carolina, we actually did have bayonets that we trained with. — Josh Mandel

Few men are killed by the bayonet, many are scared by it. Bayonets should be fixed when the fire fight starts — George S. Patton

A revolution is an idea, taken up by bayonets. — Napoleon Bonaparte

They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets! — Rafael Sabatini

The day will come, sooner or later, when people will wonder at the necessity of taking all this trouble to expose the folly of a system, so childish and absurd, and yet so often enforced at the point of a bayonet. — Jean-Baptiste Say

Not peace at any price! Chains are worse than bayonets. — Douglas William Jerrold

The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks. — Kurt Vonnegut

All bayonets are bad. — W.S. Gilbert

Men must have somewhat altered the course of nature; for they were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves. God did not give them twenty-four-pounders or bayonets, yet they have made themselves bayonets and guns to destroy each other. In the same category I place not only bankruptcies, but the law which carries off the bankrupts' effects, so as to defraud their creditors. — Voltaire

Then, Sir, we will give them the bayonet! — Stonewall Jackson

If our country, when pressed with wrongs at the point of the bayonet, had been governed by its heads instead of its hearts, where should we have been now? Hanging on a gallows as high as Haman's. — Thomas Jefferson

You see these dictators up on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. They're afraid of words and thought ... They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words ... A state of society where men may not speak their mind - where children denounce their parents to the police - where a businessman or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinion. Such a state of society cannot long endure if it is continually in contact with the healthy outside world. — Winston Churchill

War is becoming an anachronism; if we have battled in every part of the continent it was because two opposing social orders were facing each other, the one which dates from 1789, and the old regime. They could not exist together; the younger devoured the other. I know very well, that, in the final reckoning, it was war that overthrew me, me the representative of the French Revolution, and the instrument of its principles. But no matter! The battle was lost for civilization, and civilization will inevitably take its revenge. There are two systems, the past and the future. The present is only a painful transition. Which must triumph? The future, will it not? Yes indeed, the future! That is, intelligence, industry, and peace. The past was brute force, privilege, and ignorance. Each of our victories was a triumph for the ideas of the Revolution. Victories will be won, one of these days, without cannon, and without bayonets. — Napoleon Bonaparte

And before they ate the last supper of life-ending mushrooms, they would pound the drums and sound the hours. They would ready the souls of their bodies, the soul of the eyes, the soul of the mouths, all of them, one by one. They would know to be ready, to not dillydally and get left behind. Soon the soldiers would arrive. They would stab them with their bayonets, shoot them with their rifles, but they would already be gone, their bodies empty like the hollow husks of the emeralds beetles. — Amy Tan

Under divine blessing, we must rely on the bayonet when firearms cannot be furnished — Stonewall Jackson

You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand-Perigord

Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets. — Barack Obama

Seventeen's not so young. A hundred years ago people got married when they were practically our age."
"Yeah, that was before electricity and the Internet. A hundred years ago eighteen-year-old guys were out there fighting wars with bayonets and holding a man's life in their hands! They lived a lot of life by the time they were our age. What do kids our age know about love and life? — Jenny Han

We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions. — James Madison

We hope never to live in a Republic where one section is pinned to the other section by bayonets. — Horace Greeley

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. — Barack Obama

My policy is trust peace and to put aside the bayonet. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Light has spread, and even bayonets think. — Lajos Kossuth

In his self-serving view of events, Lee believed that he had performed a prodigious feat, rescuing his overmatched army from danger and organizing an orderly retreat. "'The American troops would not stand the British bayonets," he insisted to Washington. "You damned poltroon," Washington rejoined, "you never tried them!" Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee "till the leaves shook on the tree," recalled General Scott. "Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since. — Ron Chernow

When it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members' grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalise the movement. Or as Sidney Tarrow puts it, "actions that begin in the streets [can be] resolved in the halls of government or by the bayonets of the army. — Reza Aslan

And the Americans were told they were going to attack this heavily defended position with unloaded muskets, just with their fixed bayonets. It was a nighttime attack and they didn't want to be shooting each other. They were commanded by that gentleman on your ten-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, the future secretary of the Treasury. — Sarah Vowell

You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long. — Boris Yeltsin

(In Austria after VE Day)
Sergeant Mercier ... dressed in a full German officer's uniform, topped off with a monocle for his right eye. Someone got the bright idea to march him over to the company orderly room and turn him in at rifle point to Captain Speirs.
Someone got word to Speirs before Mercier showed up. When troopers brought Mercier up to Speirs's desk, prodding him with bayonets, Speirs did not look up. One of the troopers snapped a salute and declared, "Sir, we have captured this German officer. What should we do with him?"
"Take him out and shoot him," Speirs replied, not looking up.
"Sir," Mercier called out, "sir, please, sir, it's me, Sergeant Mercier."
"Mercier, get out of that silly uniform," Speirs ordered. — Stephen E. Ambrose

The United States in the twenty-first century is not very much like nineteenth-century Prussia (Prussia today isn't much like Prussia then, either), but we still use its educational methods. We would never think of using its transportation methods (horsepower was literally horsepower), its communication methods (telegraphs), or its military technology (muzzle-loaders and bayonets). But government-run systems have a way of preserving themselves well past any rational point, which is why the United States still maintains the helium reserve it established for dirigible warfare - presumably to fight those nineteenth-century Prussians. — Kevin D. Williamson

Champs-de-Mars, the day of celebration: a crowd of people in Sunday clothes. Women with parasols, pet dogs on leads. Stickyfingered children pawing at their mothers; people who have bought coconuts and don't know what to make of them. Then the glint of light on bayonets, people clutching hands, whirling children off their feet, pushing and calling out in alarm as they are separated from their families. Some mistake, there must be some mistake. The red flag of martial law is unfurled. What's a flag, on a day of celebration? Then the horrors of the first volley. And back, losing footing, blood blossoming horribly on the grass, fingers under stampeding feet, the splinter of hoof on bone. It is over within minutes. An example has been made. A soldier slides from his saddle and vomits. — Hilary Mantel

A Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and save in defense will draw my sword on none. — Robert E.Lee

The miners lost because they had only the constitution. The other side had bayonets. In the end, bayonets always win. — Mother Jones

Suddenly, the brave warriors parading to combat with bugles and bayonets were replaced by the push of a button. — Maggie Young

In the armed forces, those who fight on the ground generally see those on ships as much better off. The Marines live in both worlds, and they have strong views. Major General Julian C. Smith put it well on the eve of the bloody 1943 Tarawa landing: "Even though you Navy officers do come in to about a thousand yards, I remind you that you have a little armor. I want you to know that Marines are crossing that beach with bayonets, and the only armor they will have is a khaki shirt." As an admiral who had risen from the ranks once told an Army infantryman, the worst wardroom always trumps the best foxhole. — Daniel P. Bolger

These are not soldiers, these are men. They are notadventurers or warriors, designed for human butchery - as butchers or cattle. They are the ploughmen or workers that one recognizes even in their uniforms. They are uprooted civilians. They are ready, waiting for the signal for death or murder, but when you examine their faces between the vertical ranks of bayonets, they are nothing but men. — Henri Barbusse

We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies. Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position. — Shelby Foote

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root ... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. — Ronald Reagan

A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it. — William Ralph Inge

A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets. — Napoleon Bonaparte