Bill Mauldin Quotes

When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him
ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed.

Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it.

When we ain't fightin' we should act like sojers

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.

'Peace' is when nobody's shooting. A 'just peace' is when our side gets what it wants.

A soldier's life revolves around his mail. Like many others, I've been able to follow my kid's progress from the day he was born until now he is able to walk and talk a little, and although I have never seen him I know him very well.

I drew pictures for and about the soldiers because I knew what their life was like and understood their gripes. I wanted to make something out of the humorous situations which come up even when you don't think life could be any more miserable.

[Editorial cartooning] is essentially a destructive art. We are not pontificators, or molders of thought - or at least we shouldn't try to be. Ours is more the role of the lowly gadfly: circle and stab, circle and stab. Roughly put, our credo should be, if it's big, hit it.

I'm convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else.