Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

“Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.”

“An Emperor confides in national soldiers, not in mercenaries.”

“Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.”

“Posterity will talk of Washington as the founder of a great empire, when my name shall be lost in the vortex of revolution.”

“A magistrate is not a father; he must be just and severe. Only tyrants are fathers.”

“Of all the peoples of Europe, Spaniards disgust me the least.”

“For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!”

“Men have their virtues and their vices, their heroisms and their perversities; men are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but possess and practice all that there is of good and bad here below. Such is the general rule. Temperament, education, the accidents of life, are modifying factors. Outside of this, everything is ordered arrangement, everything is chance. Such has been my rule of expectation and it has usually brought me success.”

“To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.”

“We walk faster when we walk alone.”

“If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity. This is the only way to make it shorter and consequently less inhuman.”

“In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.”

“A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights. Men are moved by only two mechanisms: fear and self-interest. Victory belongs to the most persevering.”

“A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.”

“England would be better off without Canada; it keeps her in a prepared state for war at a great expense and constant irritation.”

“The people excited by ambitious demagogues, sooner or later return into the hands of the Aristocracy.”

“The only true conquests-those that awaken no regrets- are those obtained over our ignorance.”

“Orders and decorations are necessary in order to dazzle the people.”

“It is not set speeches at the moment of battle that render soldiers brave.”

“Mankind are in the end always governed by superiority of intellectual faculties, and none are more sensible of this than the military profession. When, on my return from Italy, I assumed the dress of the Institute, and associated with men of science, I knew what I was doing: I was sure of not being misunderstood by the lowest drummer boy in the army.”

“We should wash our dirty linen at home.”

“There is no real force without justice.”

“Variety made the Revolution. Liberty was just a pretext.”

“It should not be believed that a march of three or four days in the wrong direction can be corrected by a countermarch. As a rule, this is to make two mistakes instead of one.”

“The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.”