Scipio matched this confidence after he had landed in Africa. Two spies sent by Hannibal were caught in his camp, and when they were...

Hitler was not a great man in the good sense, but he did share characteristics in his youth which are consistent with other great men:

From Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the sweetest English authors, comes a story. There was a ship in a violent, stormy sea being driven against the rocks. Any moment it might be dashed to pieces. The passengers in the ship were huddled together in terror, facing certain death. In the agony of that moment one of the men said, “I am going up to the pilot’s house and see the pilot.” He made his way up and up and up, and finally to the pilot’s house. There he found the pilot, cha

John Greenwood was a 16 year old boy who enlisted in the Revolutionary Army. Shortly after he joined the army he witnessed the aftermath of a great battle as the soldiers who fought were returning to their base:

“No matter how bad things got, no matter how anxious the staff became, the commander had to preserve optimism in himself and in his command. Without confidence, enthusiasm and optimism in the command, victory is scarcely obtainable.”

As the good chorus-singers in tragedy cannot render solos, but can sing perfectly well with a number of other voices, so some men cannot walk around by themselves. Man, if you are anybody, both walk around by yourself, and talk to yourself, and don’t hide yourself in the chorus. Let yourself be laughed at sometimes, look about you, shake yourself up, so as to find out who you actually are.

Epictetus, “Where the things that lie outside the province of the moral purpose are involved, there show confidence, but where the things that lie within the province of the moral purpose are involved, there show caution?” For if the evil lies in an evil exercise of the moral purpose, it is only in regard to matters of this kind that it is right to employ caution; but if the things which lie outside the province of the moral purpose and are not under our control are nothing t

Epictetus, "Perhaps the following contention of the philosophers appears paradoxical to some, but nevertheless let us to the best of our ability consider whether it is true that “we ought to do everything both cautiously and confidently at the same time.”"

Churchill on Adversity:

The doctrine of the offensive had its fount in the Ecole Superieure de la Guerre, or War College, the ark of the army’s intellectual elite, whose director, General Ferdinand Foch, was the molder of French military theory of his time. Foch’s mind, like a heart, contained two valves: one pumped spirit into strategy; the other circulated common sense. On the one had Foch preached a mystique of will expressed in his famous aphorisms, “The will to conquer is the first condition o