Douglas MacArthur Quotes

Years wrinkle the skin. Giving up wrinkles the soul.

Have a good plan, execute it violently, and do it today.

Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.

I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only be deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul.

Blank cartridges should never be used against a mob, nor should a volley be fired over the heads of the mob even if there is little danger of hurting persons in the rear. Such things will be regarded as an admission of weakness, or an attempt to bluff, and may do more harm than good.

Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Beware not the enemy from 'without' but the enemy from 'within'.

We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of government power.

It was close; but that's the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

Never ask age of a woman.

While no man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China, and such was never given a thought, the new situation did urgently demand a drastic revision of strategic planning if our political aim was to defeat this new enemy as we had defeated the old.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

In short, is American life of the future to be characterized by freedom or by servitude, strength or weakness? The answer must be clear and unequivocal if we are to avoid the pitfalls toward which we are now heading with such certainty. In many respects it is not to be found in any dogma of political philosophy but in those immutable precepts which underlie the Ten Commandments.

He thus reaps the full fruits which result from his toil and labors with the incentive of free enterprise to maximize his effort to achieve increasing production. Representing over a half of Japan's total population, the agriculture workers have become an invincible barrier against the advance of socialistic ideas which would relegate all to the indignity of state servitude.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.

We must offer the world leadership designed to advance the goal of universal progress and enduring peace.

Men will not fight and die without knowing what they are fighting and dying for.

Global war has become Frankenstein's monster, threatening to destroy both sides.

Wars are caused by unprotected wealth.

I realize that advice is worth what it costs--that is, nothing.

No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.

In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory.

Old soldiers never die, they just lose their grip on reality after traumatic brain injuries.

The Puerto Ricans forming the ranks of the gallant 65th Infantry on the battlefields of Korea … are writing a brilliant record of achievement in battle and I am proud indeed to have them in this command. I wish that we might have many more like them.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whatever your years, there is in every being's heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life.

In no other profession are the penalties for employing untrained personnel so appalling or so irrevocable as in the military.

However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.

From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea - written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo - "There is no substitute for victory!"

By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder - infinitely prouder - to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentiality of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battalions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son, when I am gone, will remember me not from the battle field but in the home repeating with him our simple daily prayer, Our Father Who Art in Heaven.

If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.

I came out of Bataan and I shall return!

Are we going to continue to yield personal liberties and community autonomy to the steady inexplicable centralization all political power or restore the Republic to Constitutional direction, regain our personal liberties and reassume the individual state's primary responsibility and authority in the conduct of local affairs? Are we going to permit a continuing decline in public and private morality or re-establish high ethical standards as the means of regaining a diminishing faith in the integrity of our public and private institutions?

It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

I see that the flagpole still stands. Have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.

I've looked that old scoundrel death in the eye many times but this time I think he has me on the ropes.

Training distinguishes an army from an armed mob.

A better world shall emerge based on faith and understanding.

The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

I know that this operation will be sort of helter-skelter. But the First Marine Division is going to win the war by landing at Inchon.

The hated system of land tenure, so contributory to general unrest in Asia, has been abolished. Every farmer is now accorded the right and dignity of ownership of the land he long has tilled.

It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past...

There is not one incident in the history of humanity in which defeatism led to peace which was anything other than a complete fraud.

I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country. The issues are global and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector, oblivious to those of another, is but to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is commonly referred to as the Gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the Gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other.

People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. We have come dedicated and committed to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of your people.