Gentlemen, I would rather have written those lines than take Quebec tomorrow.

To his troops, 12 September 1759, after reciting most of Thomas Gray's Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard the evening before storming Quebec City. Quoted in Francis Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), and paraphrased in J. Playfair's "Biographical Account of J. Robinson", Transactions Royal Society of Edinburgh, 7 (1814), p. 499