Killing Rommel Quotes

“Jewish despair arises from want and can be cured by surfeit. Give a penniless Jew fifty quid and he perks right up. Irish despair is different. Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman’s complaint lies not with his circumstances, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with the injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Money doesn’t help. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That’s why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they’re angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion. The initial fear is that one has lost something. A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous baggage. In fact, he has become more “himself,” by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“The role of the officer, in my experience, is nothing grander than to stand sentinel over himself and his men, towards the end of keeping them from forgetting who they are and what their objective is, how to get there, and what equipment they’re supposed to have when they arrive.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“I must carry on—for my mates, for England, for Rose and for our child. The alternative is unthinkable. With this, I understand the perverse logic of war and the true tragedy of armed conflict. The enemy against whom we fight are human beings like ourselves, individuals with whom each of us might have been friends except for the deranged fictions of nation, doctrine, race and religion, and whom now we must murder (as they seek to murder us) in the name of those very same fictions.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Nor am I “leading” in any way that the military manuals would recognise or commend. I’m just slogging miserably beside the others. But we are one, each giving his all. I catch a second wind, and I feel my brothers-in-arms catch theirs too. By”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Colonel L., in whose eyes I was a first-rate Riot Acter or, worse, an intellectual—in his phrase, “someone who reads books”—the most damning appraisal that could be made of a junior lieutenant.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Crazy,' says Paddy Mayne, 'is our business.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel: An action-packed, tense and thrilling wartime adventure guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat

“(On realising that he is not a born warrior, as the rest of his troop are):
A cherished self-conception must be given up, and one feels diminished by it. This is mistaken, however. A person discovers that he has been made stronger by the jettisoning of this sham and disadvantageous bag-gage. In fact, he has become more “himself,” by aligning his self-concept more closely with fact.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“There exists a real danger that our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey-man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him. He is by no means a superman and it is highly undesirable that our men should credit him with supernatural powers. . . . We must refer to “the Germans” or “the Axis powers” . . . and not always keep harping on Rommel. Please impress upon all commanders that, from a psychological point of view, this is a matter of the highest importance.

Quote from General Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C of Eighth Army,”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“In an odd way,” he says, “your making a hash of this has brought you into the club. We’ve all committed our share of balls-ups. What counts is setting things right and pressing on.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“He is, we are told, a warrior from a bygone era, an old-fashioned knight for whom the virtues of chivalry and respect for the foe are indivisible from the passion for victory. In other words,” says Kennedy Shaw, “you can’t even hate the bastard!”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“This is how command passes from a weak officer to a stronger. No rank alters; no papers are filed. Without a word, every man understands.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“A good tutor can make one’s college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“What is it about featureless wastes that appeals so powerfully to the Anglo-Saxon soul?”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Let me say this about courage under fire. In my experience, valour in action counts for far less than simply performing one’s commonplace task without cocking it up. This is by no means as simple as it sounds.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“From what I’ve seen, the operations of war are constituted less of glorious attacks and valiant defences and more of an ongoing succession of mundane and often excruciating balls-ups.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“The virtues of resourcefulness, self-composure, patience, hardiness, not to mention a sense of humour, were prized as highly as those of bravery, aggressiveness, and raw martial rigour.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“In frontline dressing stations, wounded men of Axis and Allied armies often received treatment side by side, on no few occasions from German and British medical officers working shoulder to shoulder. The leading exemplar of this code was Rommel himself. When orders from Hitler mandated the execution of captured British commandos, Rommel tossed the document into the trash.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Only men who do not mind a hard life, with scanty food, little water and lots of discomfort, men who possess stamina and initiative, need apply.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons. I”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“All genuine epiphanies seem to follow this model: their defining quality is the relinquishment of delusion.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Memoirs of the North Africa campaign attest that, fierce and brutal as much of the fighting was, relations between individual enemies retained a quality of forbearance that seems, today, almost impossible to imagine. This”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“What appeared as unendurable hardship to soldiers of other nationalities produced a species of exhilaration in our lads, raised on a diet of Kipling and institutional porridge. Some”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel

“I don't need to read nothing,' said the New Zealander. 'I was there.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel: An action-packed, tense and thrilling wartime adventure guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat

“Our guns do not strip the foe of life with surgical strokes. They take them in a holocaust.”
― Steven Pressfield, Killing Rommel: An action-packed, tense and thrilling wartime adventure guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat