32 quotes
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1889)
I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected.
Telegram (1884)
It will be a thousand years before Grant's character is fully appreciated. Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time.
On Ulysses S. Grant (1885)
You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war.
Letter to the City of Atlanta (1864)
If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place.
Letter to R.M. Sawyer (1864)
If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.
A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.
Letter to R.M. Sawyer (1864)
Allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes at Atlanta.
Slavery was the cause... [O]ur success was to be his freedom.
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman (1891)
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better.
Letter to the City of Atlanta (1864)
We do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and, if it involves the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.
Letter to the City of Atlanta (1864)
You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end.
War is war, and not popularity-seeking. If they want peace, they and their relatives must stop the war.
I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash — and it may be well that we become so hardened.
I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl!
Telegram to General U.S. Grant (1864)
You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.
I assert that no army ever did more for that race than the one I commanded at Savannah.
Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman (1889)
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
Telegram to Abraham Lincoln (1864)
It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.
"As a rule don't borrow. 'Tis more honest to steal,"
Letter to his wife Ellen Sherman (1865)