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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 518d75e | Don't become angry over little things: there are enough big ones. | Anger management | ||
| 2ba6a8c | These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| eae8d6b | Let there be no hostilityWho practice oppression. | Anger management | ||
| 1bbafd6 | But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. "I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say, "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3e93ab3 | He wondered why a tree grew so close to the same water that would make it fall. Maybe trees were as greedy as people. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 450d8ef | Never anger made good guard for itself. | Anger management | ||
| d03e4fa | Frankly, I think I might scare [the parties], and that would be a good thing. | Angus King | ||
| 1669d66 | Age is a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it don't matter" (Satchel Paige)" | L.J. Shen | ||
| f87e78f | One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle! | Alistair Horne | ||
| 9b5df49 | disposal of the "inconvenient"," | Alistair Horne | ||
| 05182d1 | The impulse to write a novel comes from a momentary unified vision of life. | Angus Wilson | ||
| 03c11fc | De Gaulle at his iciest had reproached Challe: "One does not impose conditions on de Gaulle!" | Alistair Horne | ||
| d12b3af | We shall not have the Algerians with us, if they do not want that themselves.... The era of the European administration of the indigenous peoples has run its course. | Alistair Horne | ||
| 34e0f01 | From the Inquisition to the Gestapo and the "Battle of Algiers," history teaches us that, in the production of reliable intelligence, regardless of the moral issue, torture is counter-productive. As a further footnote to my tenet, learned in Algeria, that torture should never, never, never be resorted to by any Western society, I draw readers once again to the testimony of Prefect Teitgen of Algiers (see) which --three decades on--I still f.. | Alistair Horne | ||
| a0653de | The moment despair is alone, pure, sure of itself, pitiless in its consequences, it has a merciless power. Albert Camus | Alistair Horne | ||
| 446c07b | General Jacques de Bollardiere, a distinguished soldier who had fought in Norway, at El Alamein, with the maquis in the Ardennes as well as at Dien Bien Phu, and who was shortly to find himself seriously at odds with army policy in Algeria, criticises the professional army after Indo-China because: "instead of coldly analysing with courageous lucidity its strategic and tactical errors, it gave itself up to a too human inclination and tried .. | Alistair Horne | ||
| b889572 | In real life "Boisfeuras" had his opposite number in Colonel Antoine Argoud, another para whose extremity in belief and deed were to bring him notoriety later on. "We want to halt the decadence of the West and the march of Communism," declared Argoud in court during the Barricades Trial of November 1960: "That is our duty, the real duty of the army. That is why we must win the war in Algeria. Indo-China taught us to see the truth...." To me.. | Alistair Horne | ||
| a575295 | Monsieur le Gouverneur-General, you reason in the French of France, but we reason in the French of Algeria." It was not at all the same language, as was to become tragically plain later, and in order to understand events from 1954 onwards it is necessary to accept the existence of three totally distinct peoples -- the French of France, the French of Algeria, and the Muslims of Algeria." | Alistair Horne | ||
| 6695047 | the prosperity gap between very rich and very poor in France was less than that between the handful of most affluent grands colons of Algeria and the petit blanc; while between the latter and his Muslim competitor, the differential was, in contrast, extremely slender. | Alistair Horne | ||
| adc627e | In this admirable country in which a spring without equal covers it with flowers and its light, men are suffering hunger and demanding justice. Albert Camus, 1958 | Alistair Horne | ||
| 3045be0 | Myself, and the majority of officers in a position of command, will not execute unconditionally the orders of the Head of State. | Alistair Horne | ||
| ddd399b | One of my earliest surprises in Algiers was that in the Casbah, where the highly emotive Battle of Algiers had been waged against Massu's paras, there is not the smallest plaque or commemoration to indicate where such heroes of the Revolution as Ali la Pointe fought and died; and often it is hard to find residents who can guide or inform you, even though little more than a decade has elapsed. | Alistair Horne | ||
| 7576595 | The history of France, a permanent miracle," says Andre Maurois at the end of his Histoire de la France, "has the singular privilege of impassioning the peoples of the earth to the point where they all take part in French quarrels." | Alistair Horne | ||
| 124922a | Consulting de Gaulle whether he should be present at the flag-lowering ceremony or not, Fouchet after a pause of several seconds had been told simply: "Je crois que ca serait inutile...." | Alistair Horne | ||
| 71c5739 | Back in another untroubled summer, that of 1870, the British foreign secretary Lord Granville, gazing up from Whitehall, could detect "not a cloud in the sky." Yet a month later, Europe would be torn asunder by the Franco-Prussian War, marking the end of a century of Pax Britannica and all its optimistic assumptions." | Alistair Horne | ||
| c222535 | Qu'importe si cent mille coups de fusil partent en Afrique! L'Europe ne les entend pas. Louis-Philippe, 1835 | Alistair Horne | ||
| cdbab29 | Nothing the Western Front can offer, however, matches the intensity of the five days of fighting inside Fort Vaux. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 82863b9 | the large numbers attacking in the early hours of 1 July - 64 battalions, mostly in line - was of no advantage, since they simply offered a large target to the enemy guns. As a result, this 'extended line' formation was blown away in a matter of minutes, after which the survivors advanced, if at all, in small parties, dodging from crater to crater, a tactic which should arguably have been adopted from the start. | Robin Neillands | ||
| bf8526c | The generals were now two years into this war and it should have been - and indeed was - glaringly apparent that the methods being employed to attack the enemy lines, be they British, French or German, were simply not working. Increasing the scale of the attack by the current methods simply increased the number of casualties | Robin Neillands | ||
| 2eddc36 | We're a rock group. We're noisy, rowdy, sensational and weird. | Angus Young | ||
| 8918a3a | Von Falkenhayn's plan for Verdun, however flawed in execution, was at least possible; he did not intend to gain ground, penetrate the enemy defences or take Verdun. He simply wanted to kill soldiers, to bleed the French Army to death. The Anglo-French Somme plan, even if it had not been disrupted and reduced by the Verdun offensive, was a far more risky business, with little chance of achieving its objectives without new tactical ideas and .. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 9f601be | the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken p.. | Robin Neillands | ||
| f9832d1 | What any analysis of the first day on the Somme comes down to is the familiar lesson - that Western Front defensive positions could not be stormed and taken by any means currently open to the attacker. The British assault on the first day of the Somme was a classic example of a nineteenth-century attack, only with aircraft in the scouting role in the place of cavalry. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 459cdf5 | It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat, is to find some way forward, some way out of the current catastrophe and when General Haig assembled his reports and looked at his maps on 2-3 July, he saw that all was not yet lost in this battle on the Somme. | Robin Neillands | ||
| cb82e1b | The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 750c698 | As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed from the first as an offensive but major battles and offensives do not happen overnight. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 306e62f | sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary to increase the former, or the infantry would go over the top without adequate support. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 1d6ad17 | This army contained 16 divisions, three per corps, but with a fourth division in VIII Corps. Each division could muster around 15,000 men, so the total, with corps troops and the Army reserve, came to some 400,000 men. To this can be added, for the initial onslaught on the German line, two divisions from VII Corps of Third Army, the 46th and the 56th, who would attack the salient at Gommecourt, north of Fourth Army line. More than half the .. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 443323f | To supply Fourth Army's basic needs it was estimated that 31 trains must reach the front every day, bringing the day-to-day supplies as well as massive amounts of ammunition, food, water and trench stores that must be gathered for the main offensive. More than 3,000,000 shells were stockpiled close to the artillery batteries, ready to open the bombardment on 24 June. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 76376b9 | Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing well. This is the by-now-familiar 'breakthrough' or 'bite and hold' argument and, since Rawlinson's view prevailed, his proposals are the ones to examine. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 676254c | even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance. | Robin Neillands | ||
| b092c1c | What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder. Therefore, since it was probably impossible to break through the enemy line, the next best thing was to attack all along the line, and engage the enemy in a battle that would force him to remove divisions from the Verdun front | Robin Neillands | ||
| 43804d8 | The orders given to the troops were not the result of stupidity or ignorance but attempts to cope with the hard and oft-repeated fact that there was no way of communicating with those troops once they had left their trenches. Hence the daylight attack, hence the general shortage of smoke, hence the advance in extended line, hence the 'creeping', or 'drifting', barrage. | Robin Neillands | ||
| 5bdfd7e | on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions. | Robin Neillands |