Mitsuo Fuchida quotes

“With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination.”
-- Mitsuo Fuchida

#War Quotes #Self Quotes #Navy Quotes

“The great armies, accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war by their own weight.”

Source : A J P Taylor (1974). “The First World War: An Illustrated History”, p.15, Penguin UK

“One bright and thankful look at the cross is worth a thousand morbid, self-condemning reflections.”

“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.”

“The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else. And the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves, without sinning against the rules which govern the use of language, and so making our utterances self-stultifying. In other words, the truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.”

“The guys who stick around are the smartest guys and the guys who are the most self-driven. You have to have drive. The coaches can only take you so far. You have to want to learn and work.”

“By the end of this decade, a majority of our Navy and Air Force fleets will be based out of the Pacific, because the United States is and always will be a Pacific power.”

“I don't have any delusions. I don't think I would make it through Navy SEAL training.”

“The success of our surprise attack on Pearl Harbor will prove to be the Waterloo of the war to follow. For this reason the Imperial Navy is massing the cream of its strength in ships and planes to assure success.”

Source : "American Caesar". Book by William Manchester, p. 195, 1978.

“Two weeks before the attack on the USS Cole and then again two days before the attack, they saw through their analysis that a major event was going to occur in Yemen. They told the Navy not to bring the Cole into Yemen harbor. It went in and was attacked.”

“And then, when I went into the Navy, there was no choice. You took about half of the hours during your naval training as naval courses and the other half were engineering.”