Henry Theodore Tuckerman Quotes

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

For one thing, I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.

Surviving is the only glory in war.

It is a sweet and glorious thing to die for one's country. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

No sir, anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Could anything be more magnificent. Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance.

I'd go to war for John Cena.

The enduring realization that when a great challenge comes, the most ordinary people can show that they value something more than they value their own lives. When the last of the veterans had gone, and the sorrows and bitterness which the war created had at last worn away, this memory remained.

Young people are so brave when they go to fight.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

My dear Excellency! I have not gone to war to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose.

The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.

Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.

A man will go to war, fight and die for his country. But he won't get a bikini wax.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

They never fail who die in a great cause.

I don't think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.