George Stillman Hillard

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.

A sluggish, dawdling, and dilatory man may have spasms of activity, but he never acts continuously and consecutively with energetic quickness.

A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.

It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good …

Misfortunes have their dignity and their redeeming power.

The venom that chills and curdles the warm current of life in man is secreted only in creeping and cold-blooded creatures; and the inveterate malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims …

Life is but another name for action; and he who is without opportunity exists, but does not live.

There are no eyes so sharp as the eyes of hatred.

The natural instincts of a generous heart shrink from an inveterate hater as the child shrinks from the snake in his path.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the in-tellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of …

Sooner or later the world comes round to see the truth and do the right.

Men of genius are more apt to feel art than to understand it; and they sometimes mistake that emotion which a work of art calls forth for essential characteristics of the work itself.

No man can be a great officer who is not infinitely patient of details, for an army is an aggregation of details, a defect in any one of which may destroy or impair the whole. It is a chain of innumerable links, but the whole chain is no …

Anger is a fierce and sudden flame, which may be kindled in the noblest breasts; but in these the slow droppings of an unforgiving temper never take the shape and consistency of enduring hatred.

Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.