88 Quotes by Rick Atkinson

Mail finally arrived for some troops – many had received nothing for two months or more – and Christmas packages often implied a certain homefront incomprehension of life in the combat zone: bathrobes, slippers, and phonograph records were particularly popular.

Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned.

In the fall of 1969, a hundred Vassar students arrived from Poughkeepsie to preach peace and distribute daisies. They left a few hours later, frustrated by their inability to debate successfully against the cadets, who were well provisioned with statistics and syllogisms. One cadet graciously accepted a proffered flower, then ate it. Another excused himself from the picket line discussion by claiming that he was late for “poison gas class.

Tis worth the experiment. Audaces fortuna juvat” – fortune favors the bold – though he tempted fortune by adding, “Should we fail I don’t see any fatal consequences which are likely to attend it.

Walpole sniffed, “to prostitute his character and authenticate his hypocrisy.

Whatever shortcomings vexed the Allied high command, they paled when stacked against the German fiasco. Dozens of tanks, assault guns, and artillery pieces stood immobile for lack of fuel.

He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home,” wrote one journalist.

One of the first lessons that battle impresses upon one,” he later observed, “is that no matter how large the force engaged, every battle is made up of small actions by individuals and small units.

That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners – Jefferson alone had two hundred – was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.