Douglas MacArthur

I have just returned from visiting the Marines at the front, and there is not a finer fighting organization in the world!  

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away. 

I have known war as few men now living know it. It's very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes. 

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I've done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier? 

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

In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. 

In war there is no substitute for victory. 

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash. 

It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it. 

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. 

Life is a lively process of becoming.

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. 

My first recollection is that of a bugle call. 

Never give an order that can't be obeyed. 

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.