"Strategist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... command, in the event of anything happening to your lordship?" asked Wellington's officers on an occasion in the Peninsular War. "Beresford," the great strategist answered, after reflection. And then, in answer to their surprised looks: "If it were a question of handling troops, some of you fellows might do as well, perhaps better than he; but what we now want is someone to feed ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... station at Plymouth at ten hours, my spy was upon the platform. I knew him, for those who had kept him under watch had informed me of him. I had with me two police officers en bourgeois, what you call plain clothes, and I distributed them with the acumen of a strategist. It was un train a couloir. The spy disposed himself in a compartment. I placed one of my officers in the same compartment with him, the other in the compartment contiguee towards the engine, myself in that a derriere. He was thus the meat in our sandwich. If he ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... continually richer. His real estate appreciated in value; rents went up. Every time he speculated in wheat it was upon a larger scale, and every time he won. Hitherto he had been a bear; now, after the talk with Gretry, he had secretly "turned bull" with the suddenness of a strategist. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... fellows until they commenced to play like madmen; I have no doubt they were precisely that. His spirit was like some galvanic current, and he directed them with a master mind. He was a natural-born strategist, of course, for through him ran the blood of the craftiest race of all the earth, the blood of a people who have always fought against odds, to whom a forlorn hope is an assurance of victory. On ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... cocktail and spoke no word. He was the strategist, but unfortunately his knowledge of life was limited. He picked a letter from his breast-pocket and threw it across the table. That epistle to the heathen contained some very concise directions from the First Three in ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... the hills and beyond, while the Sioux of the Carolinas guarded one flank and the streams of the Potomac the other. In those days the star of the great Marlborough had not risen; but John Churchill, the victor of Blenheim, did not esteem himself a wiser strategist than the raw lad Andrew Garvald, now sailing north in the long ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... importance. It is an interesting fact that the plan in question did not receive the support of Rawlins, although both he and Grant, fresh from the victory of Chattanooga, were warm friends and admirers of General Smith as a strategist. Rawlins, with unerring instinct, took strong grounds against it, for the reason, as he vigorously expressed it, that he could not see the sense of going so far, and taking so much time to find Lee with a divided army, when he ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... poor, depraved representatives of the race has any knowledge of the event in which Blue Shirt showed himself to be a successful plotter, a bold strategist, an original tactician, and a brave fighter. His son is dust. His grandson, though true in complexion, knows more about engines than he does of wooden swords and how to use them. The zest of life was with his ancestor, who during a long life had but ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... tone of prophetic and impeccable omniscience was vexatious at all times, but particularly galling at this agitated period. It was now his constant cry that the situation called for the work of a statesman and not of an international lawyer or strategist. There were times when he declaimed this thesis in so violent a fashion that no self-respecting man could work with him. He had lost all the able collaborators of the great Reconstruction era, and nothing could make him forgive these "apostates." Everybody who could ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... by the road-side, where they can watch the traffic and talk. We have no gray ones hereabouts (they are good to eat and suffer for it), but five reds live in a hickory hard by, and no weather puts them to sleep. The wood-chuck, a marmot and a strategist, makes his burrow in the middle of a field, where he must see you ere you see him. Now and again a dog manages to cut him off his base, and the battle is worth crossing fields to watch. But the woodchuck turned in long ago, and will not be out till April. The coon lives—well, no one seems to ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... this season of political quietude it only made the position of the President extremely uncomfortable. Mr. Van Buren soon became recognized as the formidable leader and organizer of the Jackson forces. His capacity as a political strategist was so far in advance of that of any other man of those times that it might have secured success even had he been encountered by tactics similar to his (p. 193) own. But since on the contrary he had only to meet straightforward simplicity, it was soon apparent that he would have everything ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... in the "briest o' the laft." When Lachlan Campbell arrived from the privileged parish of Auchindarroch, where the "Men" ruled with iron hand and no one shaved on Sabbath, he examined the lie of country with the eye of a strategist, and seized at once a corner seat on the crest of the hill. From this vantage ground, with his back to the wall and a clear space left between himself and his daughter Flora, he had an easy command of the pulpit, ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... sides, between the T'ai P'ing and Tseng Kuo-fan. Although Tseng represented the gentry and was thus against the simple common people, peasants fought in masses on his side, for he paid better, and especially more regularly. Tseng, being a good strategist, won successes and gained adherents. Thus by 1856 the T'ai P'ing were pressed back on Nanking and some of the towns round it; in 1864 ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... at one time to be a problem like the Sibilline Leaves or Czar Peter's will. But Secretary H. C. Whitney declares that it existed as he had it laid before him by the strategist. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... was by now "blooded to the game." He no longer needed Gretry's urging to spur him. He had developed into a strategist, bold, of inconceivable effrontery, delighting in the shock of battle, never more jovial, more daring than when under stress of the most merciless attack. On this occasion, when the "other side" resorted to the usual tactics ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... be adduced) serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy about the larger interests of his measures to be always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, beyond any other English poet, of putting great masses through the most complicated evolutions without clash or confusion, but he was not curious that every foot should be at the same angle. In reading ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... would have been, if that eminent strategist had foregone his speech. If he had laid Resolution on the table, and said, "There you are," Government would have accepted it, and he would have had a night of triumph. But he would speak. Spoke for an hour, and utterly ruined chances ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... "sounded his draft of water," and divined his probable mistakes. He has added the calculation of physical quantities and probabilities to the calculation of moral quantities and probabilities, thus showing himself as great a psychologist as he is an accomplished strategist. In fact, no one has surpassed him in the art of judging the condition and motives of an individual or of a group of people, the real motives, permanent or temporary, which drive or curb men in general or this or that man in particular, the incentives to be employed, the kind ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... telegrams of congratulation, acknowledge decorations, receive interminable delegations, personages, and journalists, and perform all the other time-consuming duties incident to having greatness thrust upon you; for things obviously cannot be in a very bad way when the master strategist can thus take "time out" from strategizing. But the influence of "our Hindenburg," as he is often affectionately called, is wider than the east; the magic of his name stiffens the deadline in the west, and the man in the street, whose faith is great, feels sure that when he has fought his last ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... political pessimism, whimsical or serious, in which Ferrier showed perhaps his most characteristic side at moments of leisure or intimacy; while the moods expressed in outbreaks of the kind had little or no effect on his pugnacity as a debater or his skill as a party strategist, in face of ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... must. That plan, so far as the Atlantic coast States were involved, was foiled at Gettysburg. The only resource left was in the West, the watershed of the Ohio, which Sherman was wrenching out of General Johnston's fingers. In a military point of view, the great Confederate strategist was right: he was conducting the campaign on the principle Lee so admirably adopted in Virginia. But President Davis had more than a military question to solve. If he could not seize the granaries of the watershed, the Confederacy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... my strategist, my financier." And Monsieur Gratiot smiled. He struck me as a man who never let himself go sufficiently ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Mr. Lincoln's part of the direction of the war in the field, and the naming of a day for the army and navy to move was denounced an unwise and a notice to the enemy. Under other circumstances, the President would have been open to criticism from a strategist's standpoint, but the particular circumstances and the state of the country and the public mind warranted his action. Foreign interference or recognition of the Confederacy was threatened. No decided Union victory had been won. McClellan had ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... elementary military movements. His army ultimately consisted of 60,000 footmen, 4,500 mercenaries, in whom he put greatest trust, and 600 picked men as his body-guard. He had little cavalry, but as Galilee was a country of hills, this deficiency need not have proved fatal, had he been a strategist or even a loyalist. During the eight months' respite that he enjoyed before the appearance of the Roman army, he spent most of his time in civil feud, and succeeded in dividing the population into ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... did!" he managed to say with the proper note of incredulity, but in his heart he was not incredulous. Dimly, Albert had begun to perceive that years must elapse before he could become capable of matching himself in battles of wits with this master-strategist. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the risk of some peasant or visitor seeing you—took the risk of bringing the police to the spot and turning what might have easily been a case of accidental death into an obvious case of wilful murder. I think you called yourself a strategist," she asked politely. ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... commanders in the Pacific War made it a rule that if any man serving under him, or any man he knew in the service, however unimportant, was promoted or given any other recognition, he would write a letter to the man's wife or mother, saying how proud he felt. He was not a great tactician or strategist but, because of the little things he did, men loved him and would ride to hell for him, and their collective moral strength became the ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... where it did as a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a master-strategist in farmhouse architecture. Dairy and poultry-yard, and herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away. And ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor, where they found Basil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave. The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation more violent than his wife's, who was thus naturally forced into the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to come to blows in his then feeble state was to rush on certain destruction; so he ordered his troops to retire, and, being a first-rate strategist, echelonned his retreat so skilfully that his enemies, though they followed, dared not attack him, and he re-entered the pontifical town without the loss ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... every evening the opposite of what the priest had taught him in the morning. But, of all his masters, the one to whom he listened with the least repugnance was the colonel. It is true that Bayonet, for that was the colonel's name, was a skilful strategist, and that he could say, like the ancient poet, with a slight variation, "I am a man, and nothing that pertains to the art of despatching poor human beings is indifferent to me." It was he that initiated Charming ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... place in the progress of this movement, in the construction of forts, long lines of breast-works, and such like. Halleck was a "book soldier," and had a high reputation during the war as a profound "strategist," and great military genius in general. In fact, in my opinion (and which, I think, is sustained by history), he was a humbug and a fraud. His idea seemed to be that our war should be conducted strictly ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... have been, and can be, found in Washington as commander. He did not have the advantages of a good military education. He did not know, and he never quite learned, how to discipline and to drill his men. He was not a consistently brilliant strategist or tactician.... (Often) he secured advantage ... by avoiding battle. Actually he was quite willing to fight when the odds were not too heavily against him. He retreated only when he was compelled to do so, during the campaigns of 1776 and 1777.... On occasion he was perhaps ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... enthusiast, nor, indeed, did he betray again during all the anxious days to come that more passionate side of the man which Brand's few words seemed to have quickened into life. He talked now as the cool and skilful strategist. Brand, who was something of an amateur soldier himself, listened with ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... Manchu—served at the Court of four consecutive sovereigns from Murakami downwards, was appointed governor of several provinces, and finally became commandant of the local Government office. Yorimitsu, his son, a still greater strategist, was a prominent figure at five Courts, from the days of Enyu, and his brothers, Yorichika and Yorinobu, rendered material assistance in securing the supremacy of the great Fujiwara chief, Michinaga. Indeed, the Minamoto were commonly spoken of as the "claws" of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... where I was sent with several hundred other chaps to help push the Huns out of the Hohenzollern Redoubt. At the present moment, as you know (or ought to by this time), I am a military genius 'ighly thought of at the War Office, a strategist Kitchener has his eye on, and a model soldier quoted every day by my colonel as a shining light to the regiment. But of course you must remember that a few months ago I was practically a yob at the game, and now of the fame (and the extreme shyness that ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... been the rational practice of the German Government that its chief strategist should at all times keep ready designs for operations in case of war against any reasonably possible adversary. Such a set of designs would naturally include a plan of operation for the case of a conflict with Great Britain, ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... the Revolutionary war until Wayne's victory in 1794, the principal contest was over the possession of the Miami village, now Fort Wayne, which controlled the trade in both the Wabash and the Maumee Valleys, and that President George Washington, consummate strategist that he was, foresaw at once in 1789, the first year of his presidency, that the possession of the great carrying place at Miamitown would probably command the whole northwest and put an end to ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... contested conflict. Satan is a trained strategist, and an obstinate fighter. He refuses to acknowledge defeat until he must. It is the fight of his life. Strange as it must seem, and perhaps absurd, he apparently hopes to succeed. If we knew all, it might seem less strange and absurd, because of the factors on his ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... dark and moonless, there was an inconveniently brilliant gas-lamp close to the Major's door, and that strategist, carrying his round roll of diaries, much the shape of a bottle, under his coat, went about half-past nine that evening to look at the rain-gutter which had been weeping into his yard, and let himself out of the back-door round the corner. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... expectations." The missionaries had declined the Order of the Dannebrog. When, in 1826, Dr. Marshman visited Europe, one of his first duties was to acknowledge this gift to Count Moltke, Danish Minister in London and ancestor of the great strategist, and to ask for a royal charter. The Minister and Count Schulin, whose wife had been a warm friend of Mrs. Carey, happened to be on board the steamer in which Dr. Marshman, accompanied by Christopher Anderson, sailed to Copenhagen. Raske, the Orientalist, who had visited Serampore, was ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... friends and co-workers, as Jomini differed from a fighting general like Ney, to whom he suggested the movements that resulted in the French victory at Bautzen. Switzerland is equally proud of the great strategist and the great naturalist, but to Americans in general the former is at the most a mere name, while the career of the latter is an object of wide-spread ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... met and liked the man, and taking him into the ranks of his "heelers," had promoted him rapidly to be chief of staff. In the opinion of the "boss," there wasn't a cleverer, shrewder fellow in the world than don Andres, nor one with a better memory for names and faces. Brull was the strategist who directed the campaign; don Andres the tactician who commanded actual operations and cleaned up behind the lines when the enemy was divided and undone. Don Ramon was given to settling everything in a violent manner, and drew his gun at the slightest provocation. ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Virginia was less successful. An examination of his campaign will leave the impression that, however superior he was to previous Northern commanders in energy, as a strategist he was no match for Lee. The Southern general, with inferior forces, captured the initiative and did what he chose with him, caught him in the Wilderness as he had previously caught Hooker, and kept him there on ground which gave every advantage to the Confederate ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... way we talked a good deal about "Stonewall" Jackson. General Johnston said that although this extraordinary man did not possess any great qualifications as a strategist, and was perhaps unfit for the independent command of a large army; yet he was gifted with wonderful courage and determination, and a perfect faith in Providence that he was destined to destroy his enemy. He was much indebted to General Ewell in the valley campaigns. Stonewall ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... African War, Dilke criticized the censorship of letters from the front, in consequence of which the truth about the military mistakes made remained unknown. He reviewed a series of blunders that had been made in the war, and quoted the opinion of an eminent foreign strategist to the effect that "the mistakes which had been made were mistakes on immutable and permanent principles." Thus, there was a doubt whether the army had been properly trained for war in the past and was being properly ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... this admirable strategist, "commence with those for whom you have no soup with the fish. When the fish gives out, start right on with the next course, and so to the close of the dinner. In that ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... and tiptoed by his still shouting master. St.-Ange, the captain, the crew, gazed in silent wonder at the strategist. Pausing but an instant over the master's hat to grin an acknowledgment of his beholders' speechless interest, he softly placed in it the faithfully mourned and honestly prayed-for Smyrna fund; then, saluted by the gesticulative, silent applause of St.-Ange and the schooner-men, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... becoming a soldier and a strategist. I think you had better make your report over again, Mr. Merwyn;" and he drew out a fuller account of events than had been given the evening before, also the result of the young man's ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... war between France and Germany the campaign was planned and led by elderly men. The Emperor William, then King of Prussia, was in his seventy-fourth year; Von Moltke, the master strategist of the war, was seventy-one years old; General von Roon was sixty-eight; and Bismarck, the master mind in the larger field, was in ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... the strategist and soldier. He planned with Lorry and the ministry, advancing some of the most hair-brained projects that ever encouraged discussion in a solemn conclave. The staid, cautious ministers looked upon him with wonder, but ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... (Aside.) There are the makings of a strategist about Jack though his methods are coarse. (Aloud.) You'd better get a new dress, then. (Aside.) Let us pray ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... which should properly be reserved for the politician. The former is often masterful, and the latter may be dazzled by the glitter of arms, or too readily lured onwards by the persuasive voice of some strategist to acquire an almost endless succession of what, in technical language, are called "keys" to some position, or—to employ a metaphor of which the late Lord Salisbury once made use in writing to me—"to try and annex the moon in order to prevent its being appropriated by the planet Mars." When ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... respect for the fearless strategist in Quality Row verged upon awe. If Mrs. Teunis Van Dam now deigned to assist at one of the weekly house-openings, the occasion savored of an aroma which the united patronage of Mrs. Tommy Kidder and the ladies ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of the settlements with a needless tenacity which seemed to hold a challenge in it, a direct and insolent defiance. And the feeling of resentment throughout the Valley was on the point of crystallizing into a concerted campaign of vengeance which would have left even so cunning a strategist as the Gray Master no choice but to flee or fall, when something took place which quite changed the course of public sentiment. Folk so disagreed about it that all concerted action became impossible, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... it with a whimsical smile, and it passed him unheeded that the smile ended in a contracting of the brows and a bitter little sigh. The fighter judged war by its victories; the strategist by their effects. Montcalm could win victories; even now, by putting himself into what might pass for his adversary's mind, he hoped to snatch a success against odds. But what avails it to administer drubbings which but leave your foe the more stubbornly aggressive? ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be the strategist. He has edged to the rear of the cabin. He circles behind Red Joe. And now in a flash he leaps on him. Joe is buried under the three pirates, for Patch's valor returns when Joe is down. Joe is tied with ropes and fastened to an upright ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... himself upon those who became his followers; but in him were to be found none of the statesmanlike qualities which distinguished his far greater younger brother. His was the absolutely finite intellect of the tactician as opposed to the strategist, who, seeing his objective, was capable of dealing with circumstances as they immediately arose; but, partly no doubt from defective education, but principally from the lack of intellectual appreciation of the problems of the ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... suavity, had overset the former and defied the latter. His story was of the smoothest. He was a military strategist, he declared, and General Leborge had asked him to investigate the citadel, in order to determine its value as the site for a ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... think, it will be agreed that Colonel Garfield was a strategist of the first order. His plan required a boldness and dash which, under the circumstances, did him the ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... beg to pull from his place on the shelf, and to present to the reader, my friend General Xenophon, a most graceful writer, a capital huntsman, an able strategist, an experienced farmer, and, if we may believe Laertius, "handsome ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... been informed of how, through the deep arrangements of that strategist of stocks, he had borrowed every dollar of those five hundred thousand from Mr. Bayard, as well as every share of Northern Consolidated delivered to perfect those sales that had brought him down in ruin—in short, if he had been told the whole romance, from Mr. Fopling's ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis |
