Ben Carson Quotes

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs lies generally between the bad and the worse.

Success in past U.S. conflicts has not been strictly the result of military leadership but rather the judgment of the president in choosing generals and setting broad strategy.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

War is best left to the Generals. I believe in letting the military authorities manage the army. If they manage it badly, we shall make a bad matter worse by tampering and interfering.

I'm a professor of national security studies, and I know a lot more about fighting than Rumsfeld does.

We have long possessed the art of war and the science of war, which have been evolved in the minutest detail.

We learned the value of research in World War II.

I like generals. I like Napoleon. I like strategy. The majority of them are praised for mass destruction, but it's exciting to see how it comes to the mind mentally.

It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.

I have always had a keen interest in defence and military history and read more on this subject than anything else.

'm a general, I do something. I go out and fight wars and win them.

He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man.

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago.

Our military thought that they couldn't get to Pearl Harbor, that it was too long a journey from Japan to get there, and they proved us wrong.

I am a general. My soldiers are the keys and I have to command them.

Life is too short to permit of wasting any portion of it in discussion with…anyone whose conception of the underlying principles of military administration is so hazy that he can advocate such proposition seriously. A proposition of this kind would be regarded as remarkable if advanced by a state militiaman.

The country is going to ruin for a want of a proper Head to the War Department.

Damn it all, the business of an army is to win the way, not quibble around with a lot of cheap buying. Hell and Marih! We weren't trying to keep a set of books, we were trying to win a war.

The military mind always imagines that the next war will be on the same lines as the last.

Military men predominated and gave no thought to the larger situation. They knew how to advance but not how to retreat.

Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge.

[President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had been around generals enough to know how unbelievably dumb the lot of them are.

There has never been a military commander in history who didn’t want more men for a longer time …

Whenever we get involved in a war, the White House seems to have 3 priorities: We cannot appear to be losing; we must appear to be winning; we must look like we know what we are doing.

The art of making war with success being the fruit of courage combined with prudence, intelligence and experience, a companion in arms of the great Frederick, who was with him during twenty-two years, seemed to us all a man most fit to assist Monsieur Washington.