Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

You assume things, like whatever country has more firepower wins the wars, and that's actually not true at all.

History is totally unpredictable.

Why should fortune have made the Huns victorious over so many nations unless it where to prepare them for the joy of this conflict?

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

I regard it as a foregone conclusion that we shall ultimately whip the Yankees. We are bound to believe that, anyhow; but the war is going to be a long and terrible one, first. We've only just begun it, and very few of us will see the end. All I ask of fate is that I may be killed leading a cavalry charge

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Destiny and history are untidy.

My favorite characters are always the unpredictable ones, and with Domino, you literally never know which way the dice are going to roll.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.

Battles decide everything.

Victory was never in doubt. Its cost was...What was in doubt, in all our minds, was whether there would be any of us left to dedicate our cemetery at the end, or whether the last Marine would die knocking out the last Japanese gun and gunner.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

Most wars are not won in a single battle.

In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Every combat is the bloody and destructive measuring of the strength of forces, physical and moral; whoever at the close has the greatest amount of both left is the conqueror.

I do not have to tell you who won the war. You know, the artillery did.

Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be.

It's strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined.

Everything's serendipitous and there's no way of knowing who's going to get sick or who's going to get hit by a bus or who's going to fall in love and who's going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it's up for grabs so it's kind of an exercise in surrender in a way.

Occasionally the impossible happens; this is a truism that accounts for much of what we call good luck; and also, bad.