88 Quotes by Rick Atkinson

Duty, honor, country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Clinton’s version went on for eight pages in his tidy, nearly indecipherable hand, the runic words canting to the right as if into a headwind.

I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize.

My country,” Prince Bernhard observed, “can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.

After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.

There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they’re great fun to write about.

Some fired, others balked. Decanted onto a strange, dark shore, many men feared shooting their own. The hillsides hissed with the night’s challenge and countersign: “Hi yo, Silver!” and “Awaaay!

A French writer once observed that, “in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.

Discipline,” Washington had written in 1757, “is the soul of an army.” Certainly.