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

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.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Service of any type requires preparation.

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.

From an eternal perspective, the only death that is truly premature is the death of one who is not prepared to meet God.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

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

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

Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don’t ever apologize for anything.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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.

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

I try to prepare for everything beyond the extent of preparation.

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’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.

A siege is an act of war.

Where the stakes are the highest, in the war on terror, we cannot possibly succeed without extraordinary international cooperation. Effective international police actions require the highest degree of intelligence sharing, planning and collaborative enforcement.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

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.

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

What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?

You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.

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

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

I don’t believe in the after life, although I am bringing a change of underwear.

I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.

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

I’m bad at picking heroes.

If I’d known how much packing I’d have to do, I’d have run again.

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

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

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.

I’d be so bored if I wasn’t going out there, knowing that I could still do it. So, I’m going to work hard to be ready to go, and I still plan on playing for a long time.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

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

Forethought we may have, undoubtedly, but not foresight.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

If you go to work on your goals, your goals will go to work on you. If you go to work on your plan, your plan will go to work on you. Whatever good things we build end up building us.

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

Do something everyday for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

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

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens.

In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that’s safer, doesn’t require us to go around the world to get all our oil.

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.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

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

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.

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.

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