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Steven Pressfield
33 quotes
“I had always wondered what it felt like to die.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always found the spear to be a rather inelegant weapon”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have never tasted freedom friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you think this is funny, wait 'till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical!”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight. [...] I was wrong.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe him, Dienekes. He's so fucking stupid, this is just the way he would skrew it up.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand. He crossed to the ranks of Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why have I nominated you, lady, to bear up beneath this most terrible of trials, you and your sisters of the Three Hundred? Because you can.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you love your country? [...] This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this. When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleagured forces, is sufficiant, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory. This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I approve of all you say, gentlemen. The fleet's needs are many and urgent. One, however, must take precedence. This item the men need before all, and we must get it for them without fail and without deferral. We must get the men a victory.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Both men were aware of the imperative held by all warrior races to serve honor before survival.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the vetern.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bear your command with humility. Lead, do not condescend. Remember, these are great events and men will rise to them. Treat every man as a Soldier. He may surprise you and be one.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of the spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing relieves Irish despair. The Irishman's complaint lies not with his circumstance, which might be rendered brilliant by labour or luck, but with injustice of existence itself. Death! How could a benevolent Deity gift us with life, only to set such a cruel term upon it? Irish despair knows no remedy. Love fades; fame is fleeting. The only cures are booze and sentiment. That's why the Irish are such noble drunks and glorious poets. No one sings like the Irish or mourns like them. Why? Because they're angels imprisoned in vessels of flesh.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One act I will never stand for is leaving our fellows behind. Bugger military protocol, or lofty notions of honour. I can't live with running out on a pal, and I won't let any of you do it either.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could be counted upon to perform the mission they had assigned me, or, if that was unworkable, to improvise and turn my men's exertions upon a secondary undertaking as good as or better than the first.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had become someone they could look to for leadership and direction, who would shield from meddling from above, and would ask no act of them that he wasn't prepared to perform himself. I provided for my men a framework within which they were freed to use their own qualities of courage, resourcefulness and tenacity.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Mammoth we attacked was not Rommel's after all. [...] Rommel himself, we'll learn later, was not in that camp and never had been. At the time of our raid, he was with the 15th Panzer Division, somewhere west of Kidney Ridge, in the thick of the fighting at El Alamein.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These are armed enemy, who have hastened to this site with one object only: to take the lives of my comanions and me. I must take theirs first. No truth could be plainer. Yet at the same time nothing can alter the fact that beneath the fascist insignia of their uniforms, these men are fathers, husbands, sons.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You English are loath to embrace the virtues of the warrior. Such an act embarrasses you. You prefer to see yourselves as civilians summoned reluctantly to arms, as-what is the word?-'amatuers.' But you are warriors, you English. You are, Chapman. Trust me, who has faced you in the field.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I love a guy who knows how to bitch. Any moron can gripe about chow or rotations, but someone who can get exercised over architecture is my kind of dude.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the end the American dream boils down to what? I'm getting mine and to hell with you.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The Soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces "pussy" in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon's eyes. "What do you call this, thou savage!" The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. "Are these God's footsteps?" Is this the 'path of holiness' in which your race treads?" Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman's shoulder. "This is not war," Lykos bellowed to Antiope. "It is butchery!" Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. "You cannot defend the indefensible!”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The foe fell back. Our companies pushed through. For the time it takes to count to five hundred, I thought we might even conquer. For now the mulishness of the Athenian Soldier-farmer, the pigheaded refusal to yield which had at first been scorned by his betters-now this shone to the fore. By the gods, these clodkickers had learned how to fight! [...] They no longer fell apart at the apparition of cowardice among their comrades or themselves, but had come to understand that the same man may play the craven in the morning and the hero in the afternoon. Give them this: they were tough. Tougher than the Scyths and Getai, for all their savage valor, and tougher than the Amazons, despite their dash and dazzle.”
Steven Pressfield (born 1943) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source