Quotes & Sayings About Great Commanders

Great commanders look for decision points. For it is bursts of energy directed at decisive points that break things wide open. They — Ryan Holiday

Despite these warnings, the Great powers' arsenals were brimful; their ranks, swollen. In this light, to suggest they groped or sleepwalked blindly into a battle not of their making is nonsense. To many politicians and commanders, the coming war was seen as necessary; some relished it as noble and desirable. To most, it was regarded as inevitable. — Paul Ham

Great Marine commanders, like all great warriors, are able to kill that which they love most -- their men. — Nathaniel Fick

To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls - deceptions, in a less charitable assessment - to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. — Scott Anderson

The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically. — Eugene B. Sledge

Business is war! Its leaders are strategic commanders, who boldly snatch victory from the jaws of defeat - and who perform other acts of derring-do. This kind of talk sounds great in the boardroom, and, for that matter, in the bookstore, where dozens of authors counsel would-be corporate warriors. — Nathan Myhrvold

Thar is two things that every national crisis is bound to show up: first, a lot o' dum fools in command; second, lot o great commanders in the ranks. An' fortunately before the crisis is over the hull thing is sure set right, and the men is where they oughter be. — Ernest Thompson Seton

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years. — William James

Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words. — Baron De Montesquieu