I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.

You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!

Wars are not all evil, they are part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed.

War's Legitimate Object Is More Perfect Peace.

Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell!

War is cruel and you cannot refine it.

If nominated, I won't run; If elected, I won't serve.

I see every chance of a long, confused and disorganizing civil war, and I feel no desire to take a hand therein.

Though I never ordered it, and never wished for it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.

You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm.

Hold the fort! I am coming!

If nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline, and even if unanimously elected, I should decline to serve.

The way to success is strategically along the way of least expectation and tactically along the line of least resistance.

Oh, it is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization.

I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash-and it may be well that we become so hardened.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian

I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come-if alive.

...[We] must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering and robbing.

We have good corporals and good sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals.

The whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak violence upon South Carolina. I almost tremble for her fate.

The carping and bickering of political factions in the nation's capital reminds me of two pelicans quarreling over a dead fish.

After all, I think Forrest was the most remarkable man our Civil War produced on either side.

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.

The more Indians we can kill... the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.

The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.

It's a disagreeable thing to be whipped.

An Army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every change in the rules which impairs the principle weakens the army.

I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant. I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all the rank I want.

The voice of the people is the voice of humbug.

I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.

I intend to make Georgia howl.

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

If you don't have my army supplied, and keep it supplied, we'll eat your mules up, sir.

Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.

War is at its best barbarism.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.

If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

I think I understand what military fame is; to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers.

There's many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.

War is hell.

In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

A battery of field artillery is worth a thousand muskets.

My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.

You may as well say, 'That's a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.