I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.

To me, we’re marketing hope.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

When you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

When I started Virgin from a basement in west London, there was no great plan or strategy. I didn’t set out to build a business empire… For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

There are good examples of companies – Coca-Cola is one – that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.

He who could foresee affairs three days in advance would be rich for thousands of years.

Baseball is like a poker game. Nobody wants to quit when he’s losing; nobody wants you to quit when you’re ahead.

I wish I had known when I was in the White House what I know now about the Third World.

Many people don’t understand ring control. They think they do until they’re against someone who really understands how to set traps, how to create holes in the octagon that they fall into.

I’m bad at picking heroes.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

There are different ways to do innovation. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them and be committed to them.

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

War – An act of violence whose object is to constrain the enemy, to accomplish our will.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

The first rule is not to lose. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.

To be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.

Solutions are not the answer.

I must have been one of the least surprised people on earth on September 11. I felt very braced for that. I knew something like that was going to come.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

Marriage is like a game of chess except the board is flowing water, the pieces are made of smoke and no move you make will have any effect on the outcome.

Bobby Knight told me this: ‚There is nothing that a good defense cannot beat a better offense.‘ In other words a good offense wins.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

I think the running game is very important to every offense. Being balanced is extremely important. There’s times where you have to throw the ball. You could be down late in the game, you need to come back; you have to be able to pass it when they know you’re passing it.

You have to make sure you know why you are going to war and then use decisive force to end it as soon as possible.

Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth. We’ll adapt, we’ll train, we’ll advise, we’ll mentor, and we’ll fight, and we’ll fight well.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

I think that at the start of a game, you’re always playing to win, and then maybe if you’re ahead late in the game, you start playing not to lose. The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

You can sometimes play some really good football and not score.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

It’s not called quitting if you quit while you ahead. It’s about being aware and being strategic enough to know that you got to get out the pool at some point. You got to put your clothes back on and dry off.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

‚Tis best to weigh the enemy more mighty than he seems.