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.

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

I’m bad at picking heroes.

Solutions are not the answer.

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

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

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

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

A lot of people are realizing they had the wool pulled over their eyes by Obama.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

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

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

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 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.

Sense perceptions can be and often are false and deceptive, however real they may appear to us. Where there is realization outside the senses, it is infallible. It is proved not by extraneous evidence but in the transformed conduct and character of those who have felt the real presence of God within.

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

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

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

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

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

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

Fool! Don’t you see now that I could have poisoned you a hundred times had I been able to live without you.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

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

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon – no alternative.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

My business is to prevent the future.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

An army marches on its stomach.

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

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

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

The real danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like action is happening when in fact nothing is being done.

A creep is someone who claims he’s one thing but he’s actually another.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

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.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

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.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

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.

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.