Sun Tzu Quotes

One who sets the entire army in motion to chase an advantage will not attain it.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it's not so easy to replace 110 horses.

General Longstreet,when once in a fight, was a most brilliant soldier; but he was the hardest man to move I had in my army.

At the head of an army, nothing is more becoming than simplicity.

These semi-traitors [Union generals who were not hostile to slavery] must be watched. Let us be careful who become army leaders in the reorganized army at the end of this Rebellion. The man who thinks that the perpetuity of slavery is essential to the existence of the Union, is unfit to be trusted. The deadliest enemy the Union has is slavery - in fact, its only enemy.

Soldiers who had been in the army long enough to know what a bloody swindle war really is would begin to feel that army life was really kind of fun, as long as [General Philip] Sheridan was up front.

It is certainly of great importance for a general to keep his plans secret; and Frederick the Great was right when he said that if his night-cap knew what was in his head he would throw it into the fire. That kind of secrecy was practicable in Frederick's time when his whole army was kept closely about him; but when maneuvers of the vastness of Napoleon's are executed, and war is waged as in our day, what concert of action can be expected from generals who are utterly ignorant of what is going on around them?

Victory and disaster establish indestructible bonds between armies and their commanders.

In the Army of the Shenandoah, you were the 'First Brigade!' In the Army of the Potomac you were the 'First Brigade!' In the Second Corps of this Army, you are the 'First Brigade!' You are the 'First Brigade' in the affections of your general, and I hope by your future deeds and bearing you will be handed down the posterity as the 'First Brigade' in this our Second War of Independence. Farewell!

Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other.

Now an army is exposed to six several calamities, not arising from natural causes, 1 but from faults for which the general is responsible. These are: (1) Flight; (2) insubordination; (3) collapse; (4) ruin; (5) disorganisation; (6) rout.

When the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account from a feeling of resentment, before the commander-in-chief can tell whether or not he is in a position to fight, the result is ruin.

Thus the skilful general conducts his army just as though he were leading a single man, willy-nilly, by the hand.

Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources.

An army formed of good officers moves like clockwork; but there is no situation upon earth less enviable, nor more distressing, than that person's who is at the head of troops which are regardless of order and discipline.

The soldier is the army.

We remember the surge and we remember the Awakening -- when the abyss of chaos turned toward the promise of reconciliation. By battling and building block by block in Baghdad, by bringing tribes into the fold and partnering with the Iraqi army and police, you helped turn the tide toward peace.

Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand. The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength; and the power of directing and employing the common strength, forms a usual and essential part in the definition of the executive authority.

Back in the day, when the emperor or the king or whatever waged war, they went to war, too. But that's been lost in time.

When your troops go to war, the prime minister or the president change overnight from an administrator, dealing with taxation and welfare and health and deteriorating roads, into the commander-in-chief. And it's just become almost unpatriotic to describe Bush's fallacious and ill-advised and mistaken and sometimes misleading actions.

We shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day... Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed.

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat.

I have fought sixty battles, and I have learnt nothing which I did not know at the beginning.

It is the business of cavalry to follow up the victory, and to prevent the beaten army from rallying.