Rick Atkinson > Quotes

“Learning to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong”
― Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

“There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn’t seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.”
― Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War

“In battle, topography is fate.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

“Any great leader in any society probably gives better than he gets”
― Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

“Now arrogance and error would reap the usual dividends”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

“In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945

“For war was not just a military campaign but also a parable. There were lessons of camaraderie and duty and inscrutable fate. There were lessons of honor and courage, of compassion and sacrifice. And then there was the saddest lesson, to be learned again and again in the coming weeks as they fought across Sicily, and in the coming months as they fought their way back toward a world at peace: that war is corrupting, that it corrodes the soul and tarnishes the spirit, that even the excellent and the superior can be defiled, and that no heart would remain unstained.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

“A soldier doesn’t fight to save suffering humanity or any other nonsense. He fights to prove that his unit is the best in the Army and that he has as much guts as anybody else in the unit.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“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.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves.… The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army.… Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Always do whatever you can to keep your superior from making a mistake.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Thomas Paine had failed at everything he ever attempted in Britain: shopkeeping, teaching, tax collecting (twice), and marriage (also twice). For years he made whalebone corset stays in dreary provincial towns, then worked as an exciseman, chasing Dutch gin and tobacco smugglers along the English coast before being sacked for cause. Forced into bankruptcy—“Trade I do not understand,” he admitted—in desperation he sailed for Philadelphia and immediately found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, printing articles on Voltaire, beavers, suicide, and revolutionary politics. A gifted writer, infused with egalitarian and utopian ideals, he attacked slavery, dueling, animal cruelty, and the oppression of women. On January 10, 1776, a thousand copies of his new pamphlet on the American rebellion had been published anonymously under a simple title suggested by Dr. Benjamin Rush.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Roughly five thousand African Americans would eventually serve in the Continental Army, a more integrated national force than would exist for nearly two centuries.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“Like any army moving from war to peace, this Army was entering a period in which it would search high and low for its soul. Only the vanquished truly learn anything from the last war, according to an ancient maxim, and the issue now confronting America was whether the defeated nation and the nation’s vanquished Army would learn anything from Vietnam.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

“A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

“as Voltaire had observed, history is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. This would not be a war between regimes or dynasties, fought for territory or the usual commercial advantages. Instead, what became known as the American Revolution was an improvised struggle between two peoples of a common heritage, now sundered by divergent values and conflicting visions of a world to come.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“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.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“The more stars you have, the higher you climb the flagpole, the more of your ass is exposed,”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“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.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“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.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“London—the king’s men, if not the king himself—conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“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.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966

“Reasonably democratic, reasonably egalitarian, wary of privilege and outsiders, they were accustomed to tending their own affairs, choosing their own ministers, militia officers, and political leaders. Convinced that their elected assemblies were equal in stature and authority to Parliament, they believed that governance by consent was paramount. They had not consented to being taxed, to being occupied, to seeing their councils dismissed and their port sealed like a graveyard crypt. They were godly, of course, placed here by the Almighty to do His will. Sometimes political strife was also a moral contest between right and wrong, good and evil. This struggle, as the historian Gordon S. Wood later wrote, would prove their blessedness. Warren circled round to that very point: Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of. Our enemies are numerous and powerful, but we have many friends, determining to be free.… On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“By the early summer of 1776, the town had grown to twelve thousand residents—half white and free, half neither. Every farthing of Charleston’s affluence derived from slavery, as plain as the blue-stained palms of the indigo pickers sold on the Custom House auction block, or the ships packed with shackled Gambians and Angolans at Fitzsimmons’ Wharf, or the pillory near So Be It Lane for “negroes, mulattoes, and mestizos, who are apt to be riotous and disorderly,” according to a town ordinance.”
― Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777

“Churchill composed his own aphorism, much quoted: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945

“Draconian censorship was soon imposed, with correspondents advised that no dispatches would be allowed that made people at home feel unhappy. Equally rigorous censorship of letters home inspired one soldier to write his parents: After leaving where we were before we left for here, not knowing we were coming here from there, we couldn’t tell whether we had arrived here or not. Nevertheless, we now are here and not there. The weather here is just as it always is at this season. The people here are just like they look. On this page a censor scribbled simply, “Amen.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“Brittany reflected an inflexible adherence to the OVERLORD plan. “We must take Brest in order to maintain the illusion of the fact that the U.S. Army cannot be beaten,” Bradley told Patton, who agreed. The war ended with not a single cargo ship or troopship having berthed at Brest, which bombs and a half million American shells knocked to rubble.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-1945