Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
| NUMBER: | 2069 |
| AUTHOR: | Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) |
| QUOTATION: | I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve. |
| ATTRIBUTION: | Attributed to The screenplay was written by Gordon W. Prange, based on his unpublished material, and by Ladislas Farago, who had published his The Broken Seal in 1967. The sentence is not in Farago’s book, nor did it appear later in Prange’s book, At Dawn We Slept, published posthumously in 1981. No evidence exists that these words were Yamamoto’s. However, in a letter to Ogata Taketora, dated January 9, 1942, Yamamoto wrote, “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; in fact, to have it pointed out is more a matter of shame.”—Hirosuki Asawa, The Reluctant Admiral, trans. John Bester, p. 285 (1979). |
| SUBJECTS: | World War II (1939–1945) |