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

If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

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

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

My business is to prevent the future.

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

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Divide and rule, the politician cries; unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

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 quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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.

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

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.

Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business.

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

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

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.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

You do the policy, I’ll do the politics.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

The press is still investing itself, it seems to me, in a sort of cynicism. It comes out better for them if they can predict hard times, bogging down, sniping, attrition.

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

I wasn’t sure of the exact mindset you should have when you go into a Test match. So I probably became too defensive when I played my first Test match. Short balls in one-day cricket, I have never thought of just defending.

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.

Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.

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.

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.

It’s what counts, isn’t it, on the Sunday, rather than pre-season testing. If you lock up, you do a little mistake, it’s nothing, but if you do it on Sunday, you lose a place or you have to box for a flat spot or something like that. It’s a much bigger problem.

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

Although almost every theoretical physicist agrees with my prediction that a black hole should glow like a hot body, it would be very difficult to verify experimentally because the temperature of a macroscopic black hole is so low.

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.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

I’m not a fortune-teller.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

If I said I would knock out Sonny Liston in 1 minute and 49 seconds of the first round, that would hurt the gate.

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

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

Sometimes if you jump into something too quickly, you can screw up something that might have been good two years down the road.

I love going one-on-one with someone. That’s what I do. I’ve never lost. It’s a whole different game, just to have them right in front of you and be able to do whatever you want.

The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

These young guys are playing checkers. I’m out there playing chess.

The first step on the way to victory is to recognize the enemy.

How you go about testing is just very different to just being in the situation of qualifying, having to go out, having to nail the lap.

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

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

To me, we’re marketing hope.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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