Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense.

I never talk about my next project.

If you are a small company taking on a big company, you need to have a sense of humor.

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

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.

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.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies… if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

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

An army marches on its stomach.

There is nothing we like to communicate to others as much as the seal of secrecy together with what lies under it.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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 takes a smart man to play dumb.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Writers are always writing about infidelity. It’s so dramatic. The wickedness of it, the secrecy, the complications, the finding that you thought you were one person but you’re also this other person. The innocent life and the guilty life. My God, it’s just full of stuff for a writer. I doubt it will ever go out of fashion.

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.

There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don’t usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp.

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.

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.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

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

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.

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.

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

Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.

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

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

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.

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

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

When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were – to the very last minute – a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.

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

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.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

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.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

To me, we’re marketing hope.

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

The lie is a condition of life.

Self-centered leaders manipulate when they move people for personal benefit. Mature leaders motivate by moving people for mutual benefit.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

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

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

What I’d really like to control is not machines, but people.

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

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action.

I’m bad at picking heroes.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

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.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

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

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