War & Peace Quote by Ulysses S. Grant

Grant strips war of romance the way he stripped the Confederacy of oxygen: with plain verbs and no alibis. The line reads like a field order, but its real target is a whole culture of 19th-century martial vanity that mistook complexity for genius and hesitation for prudence. “Simple enough” is doing quiet rhetorical violence here. He’s not claiming war is easy; he’s insisting that the winning theory is brutally uncomplicated, and that most failures come from leaders who refuse to accept what the situation demands.

The intent is managerial as much as martial: locate the problem, close distance, apply overwhelming force, maintain tempo. Each sentence is a step in a feedback loop. “Find out where your enemy is” elevates intelligence over bravado. “Get at him as soon as you can” is Grant’s contempt for delay, the enemy of momentum. “Strike him as hard as you can” telegraphs his embrace of mass and material superiority - not as cruelty for its own sake, but as the quickest path to breaking an opponent’s capacity to continue. “Keep moving on” is the subtext: don’t fall in love with the battle you’re winning; keep pressure on the system that sustains the enemy.

Context matters. Grant learned this in the Civil War’s grinding arithmetic, where the Confederacy’s strategic hope often depended on buying time and exploiting Union timidity. His Overland Campaign and relentless pursuit of Lee weren’t “elegant”; they were designed to deny breathing room. From a president who later wrestled with Reconstruction’s unfinished war, the quote also reads like a warning: the costliest fights are the ones you let linger.