Top 70 Rick Atkinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “True merit is like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes.”

— Rick Atkinson

2. “Almost everything about American society is affected by World War II: our feelings about race; our feelings about gender and the empowerment of women, moving women into the workplace; our feelings about our role in the world. All of that comes in a very direct way out of World War II.”

— Rick Atkinson

3. “Brooke’s deputy, General Sir John Kennedy, observed of Churchill: “He is difficult enough when things are going badly, more difficult when nothing is happening, and quite unmanageable when all is going well.”

— Rick Atkinson

4. “Proverbially, no military plan survives contact with the enemy. That is never truer than when there is no plan to begin with.”

— Rick Atkinson

5. “In battle, topography is fate.”

— Rick Atkinson

6. “Duty, honor, country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.”

— Rick Atkinson

7. “There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. Thats almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.”

— Rick Atkinson

8. “There is something within our biological structure that screams out and says it is morally wrong for the old to outlive the young. This is one of the times when God doesn’t seem to make sense. This is the worst that life gets.”

— Rick Atkinson

9. “I was with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, really in the middle of nowhere, about 80 miles south of Baghdad. And it was almost midnight, and I got a computer message from the home office of the Washington Post asking me to call them. I did call them and was told that I’d won the Pulitzer Prize.”

— Rick Atkinson

10. “A French writer once observed that, “in the new colonies, the Spanish start by building a church, the English a tavern, and the French a fort.”

— Rick Atkinson

11. “My country,” Prince Bernhard observed, “can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.”

— Rick Atkinson

12. “A single Sherman tank took three hundred man-hours to waterproof, occupying the five-man crew for a week.”

— Rick Atkinson

13. “MARKET GARDEN proved “an epic cock-up,” as a British major averred, a poor plan with deficient intelligence, haphazard execution, and indifferent generalship.”

— Rick Atkinson

14. “I was born in Munich, and my father was stationed in Salzburg. For the first three years of my life, I lived in Austria back when the American Army was still in Austria. I grew up subsequently in posts around the country around veterans.”

— Rick Atkinson

15. “Captain Evelyn Waugh of the British Army wrote of the Stuka, “Like all things German, it is very efficient and goes on much too long.”

— Rick Atkinson

16. “Hitler had a police state of the first order. And those who showed any sign of being weak-kneed faced prison or often summary execution. That prevented a lot of people who knew that the war was not going to turn out well for Germany from giving up.”

— Rick Atkinson

17. “The American army between world wars after World War I had virtually disintegrated. It was a very small force, given largely to practicing cavalry charges on western outposts.”

— Rick Atkinson

18. “A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains – the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.”

— Rick Atkinson

19. “If you didn’t play the plebe system as if it were a game, he thought, it could be a debilitating ordeal.”

— Rick Atkinson

20. “The tasks were too many, the seas too vast, the sails too few.”

— Rick Atkinson

21. “That at least a third of the delegates who would sign the Declaration were slave owners – Jefferson alone had two hundred – was a moral catastrophe that could never be reconciled with the avowed principles of equality and “unalienable rights,” at least not in the eighteenth century. But as Edmund S. Morgan would write, “The creed of equality did not give men equality, but invited them to claim it, invited them, not to know their place and keep it, but to seek and demand a better place.”

— Rick Atkinson

22. “A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street.”

— Rick Atkinson

23. “Unlike most European wars of the eighteenth century, this one would not be fought by professional armies on flat, open terrain with reasonable roads, in daylight and good weather. And though it was fought in the age of reason, infused with Enlightenment ideals, this war, this civil war, would spiral into savagery, with sanguinary cruelty, casual killing, and atrocity.”

— Rick Atkinson

24. “Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.”

— Rick Atkinson

25. “Whatever shortcomings vexed the Allied high command, they paled when stacked against the German fiasco. Dozens of tanks, assault guns, and artillery pieces stood immobile for lack of fuel.”

— Rick Atkinson

26. “There are a number of World War II historians I admire: Cornelius Ryan, Mark Stoler, Antony Beevor, to name a few. As for generals, there are those I admire as combat leaders and others I admire because they’re great fun to write about.”

— Rick Atkinson

27. “Learning to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”

— Rick Atkinson

28. “I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander – things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.”

— Rick Atkinson

29. “London – the king’s men, if not the king himself – conspired to deprive them of what they and their ancestors had wrenched from this hard land. They were, a Boston writer concluded, “panting for an explosion.”

— Rick Atkinson

30. “September 1, 1939, was the first day of a war that would last for 2,174 days, and it brought the first dead in a war that would claim an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every 3 seconds.”

— Rick Atkinson

31. “The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.”

— Rick Atkinson

32. “Gunners sloshed cans of water to cool their glowing barrels while others struggled from the rear with ninety-six-pound rounds on their shoulders.”

— Rick Atkinson

33. “Once again, airborne forces appeared to be coins burning a hole in the pockets of Allied commanders, coins that simply had to be spent. Soldiers soon mocked the operation as VARSITY BLUNDER, and burial squads with pruning saws and ladders took two days to cut down all the dead.”

— Rick Atkinson

34. “I’m going to leave WWII. I considered and rejected doing something on the Pacific. Fourteen years is enough. I’d like to take on a different challenge and probably a different era. But it will be another war. It’s what I do.”

— Rick Atkinson

35. “Red Ball moved over 400,000 tons in three months, and eventually was supplemented by other routes with names like White Ball, Red Lion, and Green Diamond. But as one major general in Paris lamented, “It was the greatest killer of trucks that I could imagine.”

— Rick Atkinson

36. “Churchill composed his own aphorism, much quoted: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.”

— Rick Atkinson

37. “Like any army moving from war to peace, this Army was entering a period in which it would search high and low for its soul. Only the vanquished truly learn anything from the last war, according to an ancient maxim, and the issue now confronting America was whether the defeated nation and the nation’s vanquished Army would learn anything from Vietnam.”

— Rick Atkinson

38. “Yet Allied unity remained the central principle of his command and he would go to great lengths to preserve it, including self-delusion. “The team is working well,” he wrote Marshall in September.”

— Rick Atkinson

39. “He looked as though he had just had a steam bath, a massage, a good breakfast and a letter from home,” wrote one journalist.”

— Rick Atkinson

40. “Operation PENGUIN. Fourteen V-2s would be fired on average every day in coming months, although they had an annoying tendency to break up in flight. Unlike the V-1, the V-2 could not be defended against – at Mach 5, it was simply too fast.”

— Rick Atkinson

41. “Always do whatever you can to keep your superior from making a mistake.”

— Rick Atkinson

42. “The flashy, publicity-seeking type of adventurer can grab the headlines and be a hero in the eyes of the public, but he simply can’t deliver the goods in high command. On the other hand, the slow, methodical, ritualistic person is absolutely valueless in a key position.”

— Rick Atkinson

43. “If Ive vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.”

— Rick Atkinson

44. “Some fired, others balked. Decanted onto a strange, dark shore, many men feared shooting their own. The hillsides hissed with the night’s challenge and countersign: “Hi yo, Silver!” and “Awaaay!”

— Rick Atkinson

45. “Here, then, was the crux. The king and his men believed that British wealth and status derived from the colonies. The erosion of authority in America, followed by a loss of sovereignty, would encourage rebellions in Canada, Ireland, the Caribbean, India. Dominoes would topple. “Destruction must follow disunion,” the colonial secretary, Lord Dartmouth, warned.”

— Rick Atkinson

46. “Roads deteriorated in the autumn rains, and a dearth of spark plugs, fan belts, and tools hampered mechanics; one company with forty-one trucks possessed a single pair of pliers and one crescent wrench.”

— Rick Atkinson

47. “Had the generals seen the battlefield clearly, reclaiming Schmidt would have been the least of their concerns.”

— Rick Atkinson

48. “His animating principle, as the official history explained, was “that in order to destroy anything it is necessary to destroy everything.” By the late fall of 1944, Harris claimed that forty-five of sixty listed German cities had been “virtually destroyed,” at a rate of more than two each month, with a dwindling number awaiting evisceration.”

— Rick Atkinson

49. “Men were forced to discard their overcoats because they lacked the strength to wear them,” a staff officer noted. “Their hands are so numb that they have to help one another on with their equipment.” Riflemen.”

— Rick Atkinson

50. “One of the first lessons that battle impresses upon one,” he later observed, “is that no matter how large the force engaged, every battle is made up of small actions by individuals and small units.”

— Rick Atkinson