I’m bad at picking heroes.

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

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.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

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

What matters in the Sun-tzu universe are not positions of strength and power, but situations in which you have options, full of potential force.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

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

Don’t just eat McDonald’s, get something a bit better. Eat a salad. That’s what fashion is. It’s something that is a bit better.

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 been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

When I put out ‚Video Games‘ in May 2011, it was a 5:25-minute love song; I was surprised when a lot of people said they were listening to it. I was surprised when it went to the radio, without me even knowing how something like that even happens!

I like my fair share of board games.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Most of the stuff I try in a game, in the moment, I have supreme confidence I’m going to execute 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.

Being a good husband is like being a good stand-up comic – you need ten years before you can even call yourself a beginner.

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.

In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn’t been the case for teaching.

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

Some people, they take their form of working out as a religion that they think is better than everyone else’s. I’m not like that. If you have a better way to work out, and you can teach it to me, and I find it to be useful and gets me in better shape, I’m all about.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You’re trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren’t very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

You can play fast but not in a hurry. As a point guard, I can dictate that.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

The only way you can beat the lawyers is to die with nothing.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

You look at another team’s style and how they do it, and you just want to understand how they’re doing it and see if you can learn something and maybe implement it into what your team does.

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

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best law, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

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

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn’t waste their lives because I didn’t have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

To be able to finish opportunities that I do get in the paint, that makes a difference.

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

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

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.

It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

Video games are a waste of time for men with nothing else to do. Real brains don’t do that.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

I started off with sim driving, playing ‚Gran Turismo,‘ and my Dad had some sort of Logitech steering wheel with pedals for the PlayStation 2.

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’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 my edge is dull, my sword is dull, and I don’t want to fight another guy whose sword is dull. If you’ve got two steel swords going back and forth hitting each other, what’s gonna happen? Both of them are going to get sharper. Everybody that’s in the industry has lost their edge.

Our teachers deserve better feedback.

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.

We were told our campaign wasn’t sufficiently slick. We regard that as a compliment.

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

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.

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.

It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

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

The same thing I did in 2013 is what I’m trying to do in 2014, which is continue to improve, continue to shock people. You know, I have several projects coming up between 2014 and 2015, and hopefully by 2015, I’ll have another hour of stand-up material where I’ll be able to go on the road and tour again.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

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

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

Dancers are always striving for perfection. A great dancer never achieves it: you always want to do another turn, a higher jump,a more difficult acrobatic jump.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.