Good soldiers, bad officers; however don't forget that without them we would not have any Civilization.

Your practical statesmanship which disdains to take George Washington and Abraham Lincoln or the soldiers of the Revolution or of the Civil War as models, has looked in some cases to Spain for your example. I believe–nay, I know–that in general our officers and soldiers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.

The better you are as a soldier, the worse you are as a human being.

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

Many good men have been bad kings, Maester Aemon used to say, and some bad men have been good kings.

[Slaves, for instance, made good soldiers but] “they are of one group and one mind and there can be no permanent security against their revolt.”

Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope,
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state,
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.

(Sthenelaidas:) If they behaved well in the Persian War and are now behaving badly to us they ought to be punished twice over, because they were once good men and have become bad.
(Book 1 Chapter 86.1)

[On civil servants] There's about 5-10% of them who are very, very bad. You know, should-be-in-prison bad. [...] Leaking official secrets, undermining their ministers … agitating. I had some of it in my department, usually union-led, but most of them actually want to do a good job. And the good ones are very frustrated by the bad ones.

We are poor because our elites from way back had no sense of nation.

"I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We're a host of failures."

a few of them even looked like soldiers. In a bad light. If you squint.

The generals, waking up with a hangover, realised that they had a sh***y army. How can the army be good, if everything else in the country is sh** and mired in nepotism and servility?

"History,” Bagehot wrote, “is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”