Napoleonic Wars Quotes

All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

The long years of fighting Napoleon's ambitions for a world empire had hardened the British into an 'us-against-them' mentality.

The moment Napoleon takes possession of New Orleans, we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.

You have your pens, Gentlemen, and I have my bayonets. You write with one and I will put the other to work.

Every French soldier carriers a marshal's baton in his knapsack.

My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester sea stories. Shatner was open-minded about science fiction and a marvelous choice.

The arguments over the limits that may be put on individuals suspected of sympathising with the enemy have occurred over the centuries. Habeas corpus was suspended during the Napoleonic wars, and Defence Regulation 18b was applied during the Second World War.

When I was researching my book 'The 33 Strategies of War', I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

[Of Napoleon BonaparteII:] His mind was a kind of extinct sulfur pit.

I first read War And Peace about 100 years after Tolstoy wrote it.

I feel very much at home in the early nineteenth century and am not inclined to leave it.

It has become a sort of by-word among the common people here that the two Russian Generals who have conquered Napoleon and all his Marshalls are General Famine and Genera Frost..

[Peter] Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" was my first go-to song in terms of getting into the zone and getting ready and then I quickly gravitated to rock and roll music in the mid-'60s with the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Rolling Stones, Carlos Santana. So many of them are still around and still going strong. I go out to see them all the time.

The battle of Austerlitz is the grandest of all I have fought.

By the time Napoleon abandoned his army to its fate in Poland - arriving back in Paris on 5 December - it numbered fewer than 10,000 effectives. It was a disaster from which he would never recover.

From 1801, Napoleon began an ambitious programme of civil reform to standardise law and justice, centralise education, introduce uniform weights and measures and a fully functioning internal market. That achievement alone makes him one of the giants of history.

In early 1798, the Directory, the oligarchy that was ruling revolutionary France, ordered its top general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to plan the invasion of England. Instead, Napoleon organized and carried out the invasion of Egypt, which became the first modern incursion by the West into the Middle East.

My friends doubt about this Danish business. I own the policy doubtful; but our right is clear, if self defense is clear. They would have become our enemies very shortly. Still, our national character is injured.

I used to say of Napoleon that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.

How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

War and Peace maddens me because I didn't write it myself, and worse, I couldn't.

When Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, Britain expected that America would soon lose heart and surrender, too. From then on, London's chief aims were to bring a swift conclusion to the war and capture as much territory as possible in order to gain the best advantage in the inevitable peace talks.