"Threats
without power are like powder without ball."
- Nathan Bailey
"If you're not
gonna pull the trigger, don't point the gun."
- James Baker
"let's roll"
Todd M. Beamer last words on 9-11-01
"We ain't
making no goddamn cornflakes here."
- Col. Charlie Beckwith, founder of Delta Force
"Will screw them
hard, fast, and in an elegant manner."
Major General Haim Bar-Lev prior to the 1967 war (he was a General at the
time).
"The difficulties
of peace are better than the agony of war."
Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin on Independence Day 1979
Peace is only
possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which
cannot be shared.
- Julien Benda
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
- Tony Benn
If we fight a war
and win it with H-bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were
fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be
compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last
inhabitant of Persia
- Hans Albrecht Bethe
Coward: one who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs
- Ambrose Bierce
"Next stop
Kuwait! We're going to go fast and go violently!"
- Lieutenant-General Walter E. Boomer, 15 February 1991.
To his staff shortly before Desert Storm
Every plan
of campaign ought to have several branches and to have been so well thought out
that one or other of the said branches cannot fail of success.
- Bourchet
A soldier
is he whose blood makes the glory of the general.
- Adapted from Henry G. Bohn
War is
like love; it always finds a way
- Bertolt Brecht
"I say
violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie."
- H. Rap Brown, press conference 1967
"Every man is his
own greatest enemy, and as it were his own executioner."
- Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682
"The thanks of the
infantry, in my opinion, must be treasured more by every artilleryman than all
decorations and citations. "
- Colonel Georg Bruchmuller
Imperial German Army Artillery Officer
and Father of Modern Fire Support
"The onset of
bayonets in the hands of the valiant is irresistible"
- Major-General John Burgoyne, 1777
"Success can not be
administrated"
- Admiral Arleigh Burke, 1962
"The only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797), British statesman and philosopher
(May originally have been said by Plato)
I want to
record my strong conviction that the risks entailed by nuclear weapons are far
too great to leave the prospects of their elimination solely within the province
with governments.
- General Lee Butler, USAF 1961-94.
The
terror-filled anesthesia which numbed rational thought, made nuclear war
thinkable and grossly excessive arsenals possible during the Cold War is
gradually wearing off. A renewed appreciation for the obscene power of a single
nuclear weapon is taking a new hold on our consciousness, as we confront the
nightmarish prospect of nuclear terror at the micro level.
- General Lee Butler
We are not
condemned to repeat the lessons of forty years at the nuclear brink. We can do
better than condone a world in which nuclear weapons are enshrined as the
ultimate arbiter of conflict. The price already paid is too dear, the risks run
too great. The nuclear beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid
waste. The task is daunting but we cannot shrink from it. The opportunity may
not come again.
- General Lee Butler
What,
then, does the future hold? How do we proceed? Can a consensus be forged that
nuclear weapons have no defensible role, that the political and human
consequences of their employment transcends any asserted military utility, that
as weapons of mass destruction, the case for their elimination is a thousand
fold stronger and more urgent that for deadly chemicals and viruses already
widely declared illegitimate, subject to destruction and prohibited from any
future production? I believe that such a consensus in not only possible, it is
imperative ad is in fact growing daily.
- General Lee Butler
"The nation that
will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and
the thinking man is liable to have its fighting done by fools and its thinking
done by cowards."
- Sir William Francis Butler
"What makes a
regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob?
Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of
their position and movements."
- Lord Byron (1788-1824)
He makes a
solitude, and calls it – peace!
- Lord Byron
He who loves not
his country can love nothing.
- Lord Byron
