Douglas MacArthur

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Expect only five percent of an intelligence report to be accurate. The trick of a good commander is to isolate the five percent.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

In war, you win or lose, live or die - and the difference is an eyelash.
- All from Douglas MacArthur, 1880 - 1964

About: Douglas MacArthur was born at Little Rock, Arkansas on 26 Jan in 1880. Not only was he the son of a highly-decorated general, he was actually born in a building that had been an arsenal. He moved with his family from one assignment to the next until he entered West Point in 1898 where he not only graduated first in his class, but third in all-time achievement. He was a brilliant strategist in the Pacific Theater during World War II, with a few significant blunders, then was in charge of Japan and is responsible for rebuilding the economy and government. Back in the Army in time for Korea, his boldness ended up in rank insubordination, resulting in his being removed from his command by Harry S Truman in 1951. The public still loved him, he was allowed a farewell address to Congress and his ticker-tape parade involved 3,249 tons of paper dumped on Manhattan's Broadway.