Explore Quotes by William Tecumseh Sherman

You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it. Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them?

I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash-and it may be well that we become so hardened.

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

It's a disagreeable thing to be whipped.

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. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.

The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak violence upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.

The war now is away back in the past, and you can tell what books cannot. When you talk, you come down to the practical realities just as they happened. You all know this is not soldiering here. There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations yet to come. I look upon war with horror, but if it has to come, I am there.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see that in the end you will surely fail.

I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.

The voice of the people is the voice of humbug.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian

A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets.

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting — its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.

An army to be useful must be a unit, and out of this has grown the saying, attributed to Napoleon, but doubtless spoken before the days of Alexander, that an army with an inefficient commander was better than one with two able heads.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace.

...[We] must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering and robbing.

You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm.

I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come-if alive.