Battles

Famous quotes containing the word battles:

    Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
    George Orwell (1903–1950)

    Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.
    Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)

    These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)