Napoleonic Wars Quotes

His [Pitt's] successor as prime minister was Mr. Addington, who was a friend of Mr. Pitt, just as Mr. Pitt was a friend of Mr. Addington; but their respective friends were each other's enemies. Mr. Fox, who was Mr. Pitt's enemy (although many of his friends were Mr. Pitt's friends), had always stood uncompromisingly for peace with France and held dangerously liberal opinions; nevertheless, in 1804, Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt got together to overthrow Mr. Pitt's friend Mr. Addington, who was pushing the war effort with insufficient vigor. ~ J. Christopher Herold

Now that Janet and Frances were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed that there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland - even perhaps in England - and it would have been a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally a lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be fêted and cultivated as true archivists. ~ Elspeth Barker

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I. Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed. ~ Homer Bone

On the heels of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution: a brief promise of democracy followed by a train of regicides, putsches, fanatics, mobs, terrors, and preemptive wars, culminating in a megalomaniacal emperor and an insane war of conquest. More than a quarter of a million people were killed in the Revolution and its aftermath, and another 2 to 4 million were killed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In reflecting on this catastrophe, it was natural for people to reason, "After this, therefore because of this," and for intellectuals on the right and the left to blame the Enlightenment. This is what you get, they say, when you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, ~ Steven Pinker

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours. ~ David Cameron

So, what's the story?"
"No story. Just a nightmare."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning, heavy compression lines in his cartilage, severe bruising on his kidneys, liver and lower intestines. Fracture marks on his collar bone, tibia, radius, humerus, scapular, femur and every single one of his ribs have been broken. Don't even get me started on the concussive damage to his skull and brain tissue. Twenty-three percent of this boys body is scared for life. And yet, every organ is functioning normally and his neurological activity is above average. He's eighteen years old and he weights about two bills but remove the scar tissue and he'd weigh about a buck-ten. All in all, I say he lived inside a hydraulic car press, went through the Napoleonic wars and was on board the Hindenburg when it went down in flame and yet he's okay ... this boy just refuses to die. ~ S.L.J. Shortt

The war against Napoleon was won not by England but by Russia, Austria, and Prussia; but England won the last battle and she won the peace. ~ J. Christopher Herold

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land.
In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of
the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes;
the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political
power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated
different people unequally based on their birth status.
These changes created the type of inclusive economic
institutions that would then allow industrialization to take
root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all
the places that the French controlled, whereas places such
as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not
conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was
temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant. ~ Daron Acemoglu

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history - a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world - from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. ~ Ayn Rand

Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense. ~ J. Christopher Herold

Triage on a battlefield (where the word originated in the Napoleonic Wars) came down to three choices: Those that don't need help right now, those that can survive if they get help right now and those that are probably going to die whether they get help or not. ~ John Ringo

The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism. ~ J. Christopher Herold

My wisdom is for my friends, my folly for myself. ~ Frederick Marryat

According to legend, when a monkey survived a shipwreck off the north-east coast near Hartlepool during the Napoleonic wars, it was hanged as a suspected French spy. The monkey did not help its defense by being dressed in a French navy uniform when it was found, or by refusing to answer its interrogators (some local fishermen) in English. The sounds that came from the monkey were assumed to be French, and so the monkey was strung up at the beach. ~ Chris Roberts

Half a world away, on the same Friday, the Chamber of Deputies in France opened debate on paying the United States a debt of 25 million francs (about $5 million) as an indemnity for French damage to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay the money under an 1831 treaty, but after four days of consideration, by a margin of eight, France declined to honor its obligations. ~ Jon Meacham

The brief legal emancipation of Jews during the Napoleonic wars released unparalleled economic, professional, and cultural energies. It was though a high dam had suddenly been breached. ~ Amos Elon

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no
black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and
shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century - who do you
think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? - you can
imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as
'black-on-black' violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever
been referred to as 'white-on-white' crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war,
the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of
murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite
hundreds of millions of 'white' people killing each other throughout European
history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite
the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost
entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

Yet apparently working-class black Londoners had imported from America a
rap-induced mystery nigger gene (similar to the slave sprint one?) that caused
black people to kill not for all of the complex reasons that other humans kill, but
simply because they are 'black', and sometimes because they listened to too
much rap, grime or dancehall. This is, after all, what the phrase 'black-on-black
Akala

Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to ~ Kate Atkinson

War's all either country knows, and everything seems to depend on it now. ~ Samuel Snoek-Brown

But now, Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world that they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

When we weigh up the balance sheet of our lives, it's always easy to see the costs. People we've hurt, mistakes we've made. But the other side of the balance can be harder to make out. How do you measure what didn't happen? Friends who didn't die because of something you did, wars that didn't start, cities that never burned. That has to count for something, doesn't it?"

"You can't know what would have happened," Winter said. "Maybe everyone would have been better off."

"It's possible," Abraham said placidly. "But you can't know that for certain, either. Out of all the possible worlds, we can't know if this is the best, the worst, or somewhere in between. But it's one we've got. ~ Django Wexler

Well, I know that George Lucas doesn't like it at all. When I was working on The Illustrated Star Wars Universe, he told me that he would be happy if every copy could be tracked down and smashed ... ~ Kevin J. Anderson

Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story. Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives - particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the 'ends-justify-the-means' traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Kennedy was president for only 1,037 days, but during his short tenure, he achieved much. At the Cold War's most dangerous hour, he preserved the peace. He improved relations with the Soviet Union and replaced tension over Berlin with a limited test ban treaty. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Fight the fighters, not their wars. ~ Banksy

If I had unlimited funds, wall space and storage, I would collect a lot more things, like 'Planet of the Apes,' 'Star Wars,' science fiction stuff, autographs, and prop guns and weapons. I have to draw the line somewhere. ~ Kirk Hammett

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. ~ George Orwell

One should never permit a disorder to persist in order to avoid a war, for wars cannot be avoided and can only be deferred to the advantage of others. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

If it be honor in your wars to seem The same you are not,
which, for your best ends, You adopt your policy
how is it less or worse, That it shall hold companionship in peace With honour, as in war: since that to both It stands in like request? ~ William Shakespeare

Saying of the Prophet
Truth
Speaking the truth to the unjust is the best of holy wars. ~ Idries Shah

I had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and children'shomes on back streets, and this real world was a world where orphans burned orphans ... I liked the other world in which almost everyone lived. The imaginary world. ~ Norman Mailer

Wars do not always begin with an abrupt, cymbal-crash rupture of conditions properly characterized as peace. There can be almost seamlessly incremental transitions. ~ George Will

No Christian has the right to go around wringing his hands, wondering what we are to do in the face of the present world situation. The Scripture says that in the midst of persecution, confusion, wars, and rumors of wars, we are to comfort one another with the knowledge that Jesus Christ is coming back in triumph, glory, and majesty. ~ Billy Graham

I have failed 'Star Wars' trivia tests. People come up to me at conventions and use terms that I've never heard of. ~ Mark Hamill

It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart ~ John Knowles

Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget. ~ Siegfried Sassoon

I'd worked in Clockwork Orange with Stanley Kubrick and since Stanley was such a prestigious director this opened all sorts of doors for me - one of them being Star Wars. ~ David Prowse

For me, I feel like, between 'Tron' and 'Oblivion,' I've gotten to fulfill my 'Star Wars' fantasies, in a way. ~ Joseph Kosinski

I like the idea of it. Just look at the world around you. Wars, terror, starvation, poverty, disease. Take the Middle East conflict, for example. An area on earth that contains so much hatred, so many frustrations, that a bomber is always lurking around the next corner, and where checkpoints and walls have become a permanent part of daily life. When I look at such a world from here in my little Danish ivory tower, it's a very appealing idea that there might exist at least--at the very least--36 righteous people on this earth. Small human pillars to ensure that we maintain a minimum of kindness and righteousness. ~ A.J. Kazinski

There's a fine line between terrorists and revolutionaries, and on both sides of that line they want Kem and every slinger like him dead and to see Sling City and the arena themselves drifting aimlessly in scorched pieces through space. They see the games as a global distraction from the wars that have been raging for close to a decade now. The wrong side is winning, as it often does. The corporations and governments are lying to the people, as they often do. Kem never involved or invested himself in politics. Since the age of thirteen he's cared about three things: his team, winning, and being the best. You can call it selfish, or you can call it a reduced worldview. The ~ Matt Wallace

Our primary objective must be to prevent wars, and when we fail in this, we must protect and assist the innocent victims. ~ King Felipe VI

The idea that the United States of American might shut down its government over abortion and funding to an organization that is 0.01% of the U.S. budget seems completely insane. Anyone looking at this debate around the world is thinking 'What is this country doing? They have three wars going on, they're trying to manage major problems and they're thinking of shutting down their government over abortion?' ~ Katty Kay

1990 was a totally political time. George Bush was president, people were dying of AIDS, a lot of our friends, and there was no money being spent by the government either on AIDS or art. So a lot of extreme sexual and political work was made at that time. It was in response to the situation. But that kind of "edgy" political work wasn't exactly what I was doing. I felt a little like my mother. I just wasn't surprised that the government wouldn't support this work. What would you expect. I had personally grown up in a world of total censorship so I wasn't surprised to see politicians wanting to take money away from the art that was explicitly talking about this entire reality of ours. It seemed like the real desire from them (the politicians) was to have no description. That's what they would have paid for. ...Doing their business, wars or whatever, behind the scenes and meanwhile propagating a giant nothing which has become a something the government and the media have only perfected since. To a very large extent people don't even know. I mean it's kind of the great product of this country. The American Way. A big nothing. A cataclysmic unawareness in the face of evil. ~ Eileen Myles

The most emotionally connected I've ever been to a character is Natsuki in 'Summer Wars.' ~ Brina Palencia

Some people go through the heavy stuff. They fight in wars. They're in jail. They start a business and it gets shut down by gangsters. They end up hustling their ass in a foreign country. It's one long list of setbacks and humiliations. But it doesn't touch them, not really. They're having an adventure. It's like: What's next? And then there's other people who are just trying to live quietly, they stay out of trouble, they're maybe ten years old, or fourteen, and one Friday morning at 9:35 something happens to them, something private, something that breaks their heart. Forever. ~ Michel Faber

The most important thing you need to know about the Pentagon is that it is not in charge of today's wars but rather tomorrow's wars. ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

We don't accept your world your rules your wars We don't accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don't believe some need to suffer for others to survive or that there isn't enough to go around or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement. And ~ Eve Ensler

To fight a war, you must believe it can accomplish something. We fight this one to save John's kingdom, or perhaps even to save all of mankind ... but isn't that what we always think? That all wars are useless - except the one we're fighting now? ~ Tad Williams

This might explain why Obama gave billions to Wall Street crooks, and dragged the Iraq and Afghan wars on and on.
Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing ... We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns. ~ Gore Vidal

As Sharar pointed out, a large part of Europe's power consisted of its capacity to kill, which was enhanced by continuous and vicious wars among the region's small nations in the seventeenth century, a time when Asian countries knew relative peace.

'The only trouble with us,' Fukuzawa Yukichi, author, educator and prolific commentator on Japan's modernization, lamented in the 1870s, 'is that we have had too long a period of peace and no intercourse with outside. In the meantime, other countries, stimulated by occasional wars, have invented many new things such as steam trains, steam ships, big guns and small hand guns etc.' Required to fight at sea as well as on land, and to protect their slave plantations in the Caribbean, the British, for instance, developed the world's most sophisticated naval technologies. Mirza Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim traveller to Europe in 1800, was among the first Asians to articulate the degree to which the Royal Navy was the key to British prosperity. For much of the nineteenth century, British ships and commercial companies would retain their early edge in international trade over their European rivals, as well as over Asian producers and traders. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I just wanted all the wars to be over so that we could spend the money on starships and Mars colonies. ~ Grant Morrison

Do Libertarians care about the poor? Well, we're not ladening them down with debt, we're not sending them off to God damned wars, we're not creating a permanent underclass, we're not trapping them in shitty schools where they graduate unable to read, WE DO CARE ABOUT THE POOR, and that's why we want the State out of their way!! ~ Stefan Molyneux

He didn't know what was hotter, her Star Wars reference or the breathiness with which she spoke it. ~ Kelly Moran

In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind - save what they brought with them or created - no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age - the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind - were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bo ~ Stephen Baxter

After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history. ~ Hans Kung