“For the military historian, failure to maintain focus on the true objective is among the easiest mistakes to detect. For the soldier it is among the most difficult blunders to avoid.” – Robert G. Tanner, Stonewall in the Valley
“The trench on the Rebel side of the works was filled with their dead piled together in every way with their wounded. The sight was terrible and ghastly. We helped off their wounded as well we could, and searched for our own wounded in front. Captain Corey was killed and never found. Captain Thomas was found with twelve bullet wounds. He had fallen and then been shot to pieces, possibly by his friends. The horses of the regular battery were so shot that each was not over ten or twelve inches thick.” – Erasmus C. Gilbreath, 20th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Spotsylvania, Virginia, May, 1864 (quoted in If It Takes All Summer, William D. Matter)
“The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
“I would not have the anniversaries of our victories celebrated, nor those of our defeats made fast days and spent in humiliation and prayer; but I would like to see truthful history written.” – Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs
“Pneumococci are great levelers of vanity and ambition.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“You cannot conjure madness out of a cabbage. You cannot craze a block of wood with an axe. You cannot blow the brains from a squash. You cannot sell such a fine fierce commodity as madness and pass it over a grocer’s counter.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“It’s a strange horrific world and while it hurts it fascinates.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“I am like the middleclass housewife who drapes her house with plush horrors: I festoon myself with small beasts and give them to eat and suck and warm them. I am a truly generous mound of flesh. I daily lay down my life not for my friends but for those hungry little persons I have never seen. Stay, says my carrion, do stay and raise a bloody fine family—there’s room for us all here and food for the children. Thus daily I am camped on, lived in and eaten.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters
“I shall not give sanctuary to suspicion, for it eats the bowels like a slow acid.” — Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters