Stephen Ambrose Quotes

″...for each of us who wants to live in happiness and give happiness, there’s another different sort of person wanting to take it away...”

“We were smart; there weren’t many flashy heroics. We had learned that heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important.”

“A man can get something from war that is impossible to acquire anyplace else.”

“You had to be a little bit awed that you were part of a thing that was so much greater than you.”

“Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.”

“Winters prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through it, prayed that he wouldn’t fail.”

″‘Hitler made only one big mistake when he built his Atlantic Wall’, the paratroopers liked to say. ‘He forgot to put a roof on it.‘”

“We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace...”

“They also found in combat the closest brotherhood they ever knew. They found selflessness. They found they could love the other guy in their foxhole more than themselves. They found that in war, men who loved life would give their lives for them.”

“They hadn’t come here to fear. They hadn’t come to die. They had come to win.”

“In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I’m treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, ‘Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?’ ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but I served in a company of heroes.‘”

“In those three years the men had seen more, endured more, and contributed more than most men can see, endure or contribute in a lifetime.”

“The men were congratulating one another, talking about what they had accomplished; trying to piece together the sequence of events. They were the victors, happy, proud, full of themselves.”

“Thus did 13,400 of America’s finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler’s Fortress Europe.”

“We are different people now than we were then.”

″‘Tonight is the night of nights,’ said Sink’s. ‘May God be with each of you fine soldiers.‘”

“And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.”

“Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life.”

″... No war can be won without young men dying. Those things which are precious are saved only by sacrifice.”

“They found combat to be ugliness, destruction and death and hated it. Anything was better than the blood and carnage, the grime and filth, the impossible demands on the body-anything that is, except letting down their buddies.”