I've been a soldier all my life. I've fought from the ranks on up, you know my service. But sir, I must tell you now, I believe this attack will fail. No 15,000 men ever made could take that ridge. It's a distance of more than a mile, over open ground. When the men come out of the trees, they will be under fire from Yankee artillery from all over the field. And those are Hancock's boys! And now, they have the stone wall like we did at Fredericksburg.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

A man who has been shot at is a new realist, and what do you say to a realist when the war is a war of ideals?

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing.

There's nothing so much like a god on earth as a General on a battlefield.