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Bill Mauldin

Bill Mauldin Quotes

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Famous Bill Mauldin Quotes

“I came back to Rome, so I could send the book off and finish the sixteen drawings. I read the thing over before I took a bath, and darned if I didn't like it pretty well, even though it may be full of bad grammar. Now I've had the bath and the sixteen drawings are almost finished, and somehow I miss the aid station. It was pretty safe under the cliff, and it was warm and we were able to make coffee. It was full of homesick, tired men who were doing the job they were put there to do, and who had the guts and humanness to kid around and try to make life easier for the other guy. They are big men and honest men, with the inner warmth that comes from the generosity and simplicity you learn up there. Until the doc can go back to his chrome office and gallstones and the dogface can go back to his farm and I can go back to my wife and son, that is the closest to home we can ever get.”

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Book:Up Front
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“When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to bed at night. Don't think of him as the statistic which changes 38,788 casualties to 38,789. Think of him as a guy who wanted to live every bit as much as you do. Don't let him be just one of 'Our Brave Boys' from the old home town, to whom a marble monument is erected in the city park, and a civic-minded lady calls the newspaper ten years later and wants to know why that 'unsightly stone' isn't removed.”

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Book:Up Front
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“My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: "The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it.”

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Book:Mud & guts: a look at the common soldier of the American revolution
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“The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. We're a fatheaded, cotton-picking society. When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.”

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Author:Bill Mauldin
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“If you're a leader, you don't push wet spaghetti, you pull it. The U.S. Army still has to learn that. The British understand it. Patton understood it. I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes.”

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Author:Bill Mauldin
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