William Manchester famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.
-- William Manchester

#Country #Marine #Fighting
But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.
-- William Manchester

#Men #Loner #Void
I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.
-- William Manchester

#Book #Writing #Editing
To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.
-- William Manchester

#Mind #Doubt #Medieval
It was his [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] relationship with the administration In Washington which became poisoned by his egomania. Link upon link the bond between events on the battlefield and his own ruin was forged, and, as is essential in genuine tragedy, the gods used the victim himself to forge the links.
-- William Manchester

#Tragedy #Links #Ruins
It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a deux. But those who dismiss him as shallow because his rhetoric was fustian err.
-- William Manchester

#Gleam #Public Speaking #Macarthur
His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them.
-- William Manchester

#Hero #Way #Heroism
He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great defenders of Christendom. (The other was the pope.)
-- William Manchester

#Faith #Two #Church
His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.
-- William Manchester

#Courage #Two #Heroism
I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
-- William Manchester

#Fear #Worst #I Realized
They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers.
-- William Manchester

#Men #Volunteer #History
Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.
-- William Manchester

#Men #Play #Actors
Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.
-- William Manchester

#Navy #Pearls #Littles
He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime.
-- William Manchester

#Men #Sublime #Shy
An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.
-- William Manchester

#History #Preparation #Dresses
The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.
-- William Manchester

#Beach #Ocean #Elderly
The sum of a million facts is not the truth.
-- William Manchester

#Facts
A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.
-- William Manchester

#Men #Matter #Tasks

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