Quotes by William Patton

“If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn’t thinking.”

“Patton’s store. A grinning man would halt the wagon with an upraised arm but it would not halt. When he noticed the quiltcovered cargo the wagon transported, he called, What you got there, Sandy? The driver turned and spat and wiped his mouth and glanced back briefly but he didn’t stay the wagon. Dead folks, he said.””

“Doesn’t the superior lose control if his subordinates have a great deal of freedom to make their own decisions? The historical record quickly shows this is not the case. Generals George Patton and Bruce Clark both used mission-type orders in World War II. The German army has used mission-type orders for over a century, yet it has not been an army that was “out of control.” What changes is the way control is achieved. Instead of controlling by telling the subordinate what to do and then demanding constant reports to show he is doing it, control comes through the intent and the mission. Indeed, control is really replaced with guidance, while the intent and the mission “glue” the force together. There are””

“If one can call anticipation of enemy reactions based on a lifetime of professional training and on thinking and application "intuition," he had it ... He was a professional soldier, a student of history””

“Conservative estimates place the Persian casualties at some two thousand in less than twenty minutes, victims of the unforgiving geometry of the battlefield. Because of the limitations of anatomy, humans are evolved to act effectively only in the direction that evolution has pointed eyes and hands. The consequences of this simple fact for military tactics, from Caesar to Napoleon to Patton, are always the same: Troops are more vulnerable on either side than they are in their front, and terribly so in their rear. Virtually the entire library of tactics, as set down in classics from Sun Tzu to Liddell Hart, consists of ornate descriptions of the best way to apply force”