William Manchester Quotes

22 quotes in 372 categories

• The coconut trees, lithe and graceful, crowd the beach like a minuet of slender elderly virgins adopting flippant poses.
• An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.
• He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of men…
• Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for…
• Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.
• They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men…
• I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
• His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on…
• He [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] never went to church, but he read the Bible every day and regarded himself as one of the world's two great…
• His [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] own heroes were Lincoln and Washington, and in some ways he resembled them.
• It is true that despite occasional gleams of Churchillian eloquence he [Gen. Douglas MacArthur] usually spoke poorly. He was far more effective in conversations a…
• It was his [Gen. Douglas MacArthur's] relationship with the administration In Washington which became poisoned by his egomania. Link upon link the bond between events…
• To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.
• I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an…
• A man's task is to find himself, and if he fails in this, it doesn't much matter what else he finds.
• Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if…
• The sum of a million facts is not the truth.
• But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.
• He was a great thundering paradox of a man.
• As she sallied forth from her boudoir, you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.

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