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

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

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.

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

The atomic bomb certainly is the most powerful of all weapons, but it is conclusively powerful and effective only in the hands of the nation which controls the sky.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

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.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.

Tobacco exports should be expanded aggressively because Americans are smoking less.

I think Clinton, after getting into office and into Washington, was shocked at being bludgeoned. So he spent time trying to be all things to all people – one way guaranteed not to be successful or respected in a lion’s den. You can’t just play around with all those big cats – you’ve got to take somebody on.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

We should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state… when you go to war, it can’t be a half-step.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

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

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

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

When I started analysing games in 2001, I had a DVD recorder. I’d be at home watching the games just on a normal TV, watching what I could and trying to figure out what we would be facing a few weeks later. The problem was, in the team meetings, I’d always have to keep going back and forwards with the footage, trying to get to the right part.

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.

Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.

My unpredictability is what separates me. If you move in so many ways, your opponent is not focused on what he’s doing. He’s focusing in on what you’re doing, and it freezes him. When they freeze and you hit, they shatter like glass.

Players who are not from the U.K. have to get used to the winds. I have to adapt my style as a result as well. Often, you are forced to keep things simple.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

My business is to prevent the future.

General Giap was one of the most brilliant military strategists of our era, who in Dien Bien Phu was able to place missile launchers in remote, mountainous jungles, something the yankee and European military officers considered impossible.

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

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

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.

Pre-emptive war might fall within the framework of international law.

It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

I began playing Monopoly for real when I was 26 years old. Today, my wife and I have approximately 1,400 little green houses – each paying us monthly. You do not have to be a rocket scientist or have a Harvard degree to play Monopoly for real.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it’s not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It’s more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

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.

I’m bad at picking heroes.

When we have the ball, the other team has to run. The most important thing is for the players to be prepared to be a little bit wild.

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.

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 is important to emphasize that guerrilla warfare is a war of the masses, a war of the people. The guerrilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people. It draws its great force from the mass of the people themselves.

If we turn our backs of the Scythians who have provoked us, how shamefully shall we march against the revolted Bactrians; but if we pass Tanais and make the Scythians feel, by dear experience, that we are invincible, not in Asia only, it is not to be doubted but that Europe itself, as well as Asia, will come within the bounds of our conquests.

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.

It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ‚em, confuse ‚em. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.

It’s a juicy thing to say we’re building a phone, which is why people want to write about it. But it’s so clearly the wrong strategy for us.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

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

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

Our priority is to go after ISIL. And so what we have said is that we are not engaging in a military action against the Syrian regime. We are going after ISIL facilities and personnel who are using Syria as a safe haven, in service of our strategy in Iraq.

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.

The more a general is accustomed to place heavy demands on his soldiers, the more he can depend on their response.

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.