Explore Quotes by William Tecumseh Sherman

If you don't have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we'll eat your mules up, sir.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

I intend to make Georgia howl.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.

I make up my opinions from facts and reasoning, and not to suit any body but myself. If people don't like my opinions, it makes little difference as I don't solicit their opinions or votes.

The young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about towns, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did any work and never will... They are splendid riders, first-rate shots and utterly reckless. These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.

After all, I think Forrest was the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

Wars are not all evil, they are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed.

You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

I see every chance of a long, confused and disorganizing civil war, and I feel no desire to take a hand therein.

The North can make a steam engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth - right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with.

Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why we did not go to South Carolina; and, when I answered that we were en route for that State, the invariable reply was, - Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war, we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.