C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Soldier
The worse the man, the better the soldier.
War mends but few, and spoils multitudes.
It is cruelty in war that buyeth conquest.
A bright musket, but a ragged soldier.
Against the flying ball no valor avails.
You may relish him more in the soldier than in the scholar.
War,—the trade of barbarians!
The victor’s pastime, and the sport of warrior.
Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier and afear’d?
My only ambition is to be first soldier of Italian independence.
We are like cloaks,—one thinks of us only when it rains.
A soldier seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.
Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.
The stern joy that warriors feel in foemen worthy of their steel.
Let the gulled fool the toil of war pursue, where bleed the many to enrich the few.
The warrior who cultivates his mind polishes his arms.
Though triumphs were to generals only due, crowns were reserved to grace the soldiers too.
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er, dream of fighting fields no more.
Without a home must the soldier go, a changeful wanderer, and can warm himself at no home-lit hearth.
Soldiers looked at as they ought to be. They are to the world as poppies to corn-fields.
A soldier ought to consider peace only as a breathing-spell, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute, military plans.
What right has any free, reasonable soul on earth to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong, even his own brother or his own father, just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any good except his own looking-glass and his opera-dancer,—a fellow who, just because he was born a gentleman, is set to command gray-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be intrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their own flesh and blood as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow’s bidding.
Policy goes beyond strength, and contrivance before action; hence it is that direction is left to the commander, execution to the soldier, who is not to ask why, but to do what he is commanded.