“I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Patrick Henry, a gifted orator and major figure in the American Revolution, in a speech on March 23, 1775, to the Second Virginia Convention at St. John’s Henrico Parish Church in Richmond, Virginia
“Please remain. You give me the pictures and I’ll give you the war.”
Newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to Frederic Remington, his artist in Cuba, in 1897 after Remington, finding no Spanish atrocities there and no scenes worth illustrating, had cabled: “There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return.”
“Hello Central! Give Me No Man’s Land…”
A 1918 song, introduced by Al Jolson in the Broadway musical Sinbad, that recounts the story of a young
child attempting to call her father on the Western Front after her mother has gone to bed
“Give me five years and you will not recognize Germany again.”
A line in a speech Adolf Hitler gave during his rise to power in the early 1930s, famously memorialized
in a photograph of a stenciled sign posted outside the bombed-out remains of Aachen, Germany, in 1945
“Give me a gas mask, I can’t stand the smell of Nazis.”
Signs carried by some of the 100,000 demonstrators who gathered outside Madison Square Garden in
New York City on February 20, 1939, to protest a rally organized by the German American Bund, the largest pro-Nazi organization in the United States
“Dammit, Brad, just give me 400,000 gallons of gasoline and I’ll put you inside Germany in two days.”
General George S. Patton Jr., the commander of the Third Army, angrily complaining in August 1944 to Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, the commander of the First Army, about being sidelined by severe fuel shortages
“Give me ten thousand Filipinos and I shall conquer the world!”
General Douglas MacArthur during the U.S. liberation of Manila, the capital of the Philippines, in 1945
“Give me the horse.”
British prime minister Winston Churchill, warning of “such awful agencies as the atomic bomb” on July 10, 1951, in a speech to the Royal College of Physicians in London
“The light is at the end of the tunnel, just give me a hundred thousand more.”
General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, as quoted in 1991
by General Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., who served under Westmoreland in Vietnam
“Give me the lesser of evils.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson, instructing Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford in 1968 to reevaluate the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War following Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 reinforcements
“Give me a few hours.”
Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower on December 15, 1941, when General George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, summoned him to the War Department and asked him to recommend a “general line of action” in response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
“Give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.”
Retired U.S. Marine Corps general James Mattis, as quoted by President Donald Trump in 2016, when asked whether the administration should bring back the practice of waterboarding in military and CIA interrogations
“Give me $50,000—here’s some names of some people we’ve recruited.”
Former CIA officer turned KGB double agent Aldrich Ames describing what he called “my little scam” with the Soviet Union in a 1999 interview
