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

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

History is more or less bunk.

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.

Cobb is a prick. But he sure can hit. God Almighty, that man can hit.

A reputation as a hard worker is a good reputation to have.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

Wit is the epitaph of an emotion.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

Women. They are a complete mystery.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

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

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

There is no gambling like politics.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

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.

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

The racing is quite boring, sometimes. It’s hard to see how it pulls in fans.

I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

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.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.

In the old generation, if one kid bought a PlayStation 2 and the other kid bought an Xbox, at his house you played PlayStation, at your house you played Xbox. Now that it’s online, all those early buyers who… you want to play with, they’ve got their reputation online of who they are and how good they are at these games.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

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

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective.

This administration is going to be cussed and discussed for years to come.

Greece needs to work on a cleaner image. It’s a big problem, as they have this reputation of being so corrupt.

History should be written as philosophy.

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

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.

History, a distillation of rumour.

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are.

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.

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

Humor is the most engaging cowardice.

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

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

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.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

I don’t think I’m supposed to boss other people around just because I’m a so-called celebrity or star. I hate that when people act that way. No one deserves it. I’ve seen it happen. I don’t call those people out – they know who they are. Some enjoy that reputation.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.