88 Quotes by Rick Atkinson

If you didn’t play the plebe system as if it were a game, he thought, it could be a debilitating ordeal.

Operation PENGUIN. Fourteen V-2s would be fired on average every day in coming months, although they had an annoying tendency to break up in flight. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 could not be defended against – at Mach 5, it was simply too fast.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.

The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.

Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts, and tools hampered mechanics; one company with forty-one trucks possessed a single pair of pliers and one crescent wrench.

Power,” as John Adams had written, “always thinks it has a great soul.

True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.

They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots – if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace – who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in.