Bill Mauldin

Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude.

— Bill Mauldin

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

— Bill Mauldin

The American public highly overrates its sense of humor. We're great belly laughers and prat fallers, but we never really did have a real sense of humor. Not satire anyway. We're a fatheaded, cotton-picking society. When we realize finally that we aren't God's given children, we'll understand satire. Humor is really laughing off a hurt, grinning at misery.

— Bill Mauldin

You've got to be a misanthrope in this business, a real son of a bitch. I'm touchy. I've got raw nerve ends, and I'll jump. If I see a stuffed shirt, I want to punch it.

— Bill Mauldin

I was a born troublemaker and might as well earn a living at it.

— Bill Mauldin

My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: "The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world. I'm in it."

— Bill Mauldin

Willie and Joe are my creatures. Or am I their creature? They are not social reformers. They're much more reactive. They're not social scientists and I'm not a social scientist. We're moral people who do not belong to the moral majority. One of my principles is, Thou shall not bully. The only answer is to muscle the bully. I'm very combative that way.

— Bill Mauldin

I would like to thank the people who encouraged me to draw army cartoons at a time when the gag man's conception of the army was one of mean ole sergents and jeeps which jump over mountains.

— Bill Mauldin

I'm convinced that the infantry is the group in the army which gives more and gets less than anybody else.

— Bill Mauldin

I don't make the infantryman look noble, because he couldn't look noble even if he tried. Still there is a certain nobility and dignity in combat soldiers and medical aid men with dirt in their ears. They are rough and their language gets coarse because they live a life stripped of convention and niceties. Their nobility and dignity come from the way they live unselfishly and risk their lives to help each other.

— Bill Mauldin

While a guy at home is sweating over his income tax and Victory garden, a dogface somewhere is getting great joy out of wiggling his little finger. He does it just to see it move and to prove to himself that he is still alive and able to move it.

— Bill Mauldin