Ben > Ben's Quotes

“They were learning the reality of war, these youngsters, getting face to face with the sickening realization that men get killed uselessly because their generals are stupid, so that desperate encounters where the last drop of courage has been given serve the country not at all and make a patriot look a fool.”
― Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army

“If the hardtack got moldy it was usually thrown away as inedible, but if it just got weevily it was issued anyway. Heating it at the fire would drive the weevils out; more impatient soldiers simply ate it in the dark and tried not to think about it.”
― Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army

“And a wild, primitive madness seemed to descend on the men who fought in the cornfield: they went beyond the limits of sanity and endurance at times, Northerners and Southerners alike, until it seems that they tore at each other for the sheer sake of fighting. The”
― Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army

“The barn by the Roulette house was jammed with wounded men. Screams, prayers, and curses made it a horrible place, with hundreds of anguished men packed together on the straw begging the surgeons to attend to them—surgeons bare-armed and fearsomely streaked and spattered with blood, piles of severed arms and legs lying by the slippery operating tables, the uproar of the battle beating in through the thin walls.”
― Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army

“In the four years of its existence the Army of the Potomac had to atone for the errors of its generals on many a bitter field. This happened so many times—it was so normal, so much the regular order of things for this unlucky army—that it is hardly possible to take the blunders which marred its various battles and rank them in the order of magnitude of their calamitous stupidity.”
― Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army

“Grant needed a win, went for it, and got it. Lee needed a tie, went for the win, and lost.”
― Edward H. Bonekemper III, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

“Although Meade’s Army of the Potomac, under the personal direction of Grant, did suffer high casualties (41 percent) during its drive to the James River, it imposed even higher casualties on Lee’s army (46 percent). In”
― Edward H. Bonekemper III, The Myth of the Lost Cause: Why the South Fought the Civil War and Why the North Won

“As the company grew, Charles remained in Wichita, working ten-hour days, six days a week. When he proposed to his future wife, Liz, he did so reportedly over the phone, and she could hear him flipping through his busy date book in search of an open day for the wedding. In preparation, he required her to study free-market economics.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

“Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has, because that’s all you really want,” Morano later acknowledged. “There’s no legislation we’re championing. We’re the negative force. We are just trying to stop stuff.”
― Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right