Bayonet

You can build a throne with bayonets, but it's difficult to sit on it. ~ Boris Yeltsin

A bayonet (from French baïonnette) is a knife, sword, or spike-shaped weapon designed to fit in, on, over or underneath the muzzle of a rifle, musket or similar weapon, effectively turning the gun into a spear.

Quotes

• In 1863, Colonel Kit Carson was ordered to clear the country of Navajo Indians and to resettle any survivors at Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, where they could be "civilized." Carson's strategy was the same as that applied against the Plains Indians a little later: He destroyed the Navajo food base by systematically killing their livestock and by burning their fields. Carson's "Long Knives" (his soldiers so named because of their bayonets) also cut off the breast of Navajo girls and tossed them back and forth like baseballs.
  • Peter Farb (1968) Man's Rise to Civilization

• It is the cold glitter of the attacker's eye not the point of the questing bayonet that breaks the line.
  • George S. Patton. Quoted in How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom (2010) by D.C. Gill, p. 70: Cited in Gill, D.C. (5 March 2010). How We Are Changed by War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Routledge. p. 70. ISBN 978-0-203-85626-0. Retrieved on 4 September 2013. 

• It is time to realize that neither socialism, nor friendship, nor good-neighborliness, nor respect can be produced by bayonets, tanks or blood.
  • Eduard Shevardnadze Cited in: North Atlantic Assembly. Political Committee (1990) Reports. p. 7

• The bullet is a fool, the bayonet is a fine chap.
  • Alexander Suvorov Nauka pobezhdat, Dokumenty, vol. III, p. 504, cited in af.mil

• A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.
  • William Ralph Inge Philosophy of Plotinus, lecture 22