Joffre Quotes & Sayings

The safety of the country is at stake ... We must let ourselves be killed on the spot rather than retreat ... No faltering can be tolerated today. — Joseph Joffre

Dare to Imagine. Dare to Dream.
Whatever you want to do, wherever you want to go, never give up.
Your inspiration may well be in a book, waiting to be discovered....... — Joffre White

The strategic aspect of General Joffre's policy was not less stultified than the administrative. The easterly and north-easterly attacks into which his four Armies of the Right and Centre were impetuously launched, were immediately stopped and hurled back with a slaughter so frightful that it has never yet been comprehended by the world. His — Winston S. Churchill

If the women in the factories stopped work for twenty minutes, the Allies would lose the war. — Joseph Joffre

It was their own offensive, not ours, that consummated their ruin. They were worn down not by Joffre, Nivelle and Haig, but by Ludendorff. See — Winston S. Churchill

The German is the discipline of fear; ours is the discipline of faith - and faith will triumph. — Joseph Joffre

The impetus of existing plans is always stronger than the impulse to change. The Kaiser could not change Moltke's plan nor could Kitchener alter Henry Wilson's nor Lanrezac alter Joffre's. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called "a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine. — Barbara W. Tuchman

The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. There was no looking back, Joffre told the soldiers on the eve. Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit. — Barbara W. Tuchman