Service of any type requires preparation.

Nothing can be more hurtful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army the superiority over another.

Getting organized in the normal routines of life and finishing little projects you’ve started is an important first step toward realizing larger goals. If you can’t get a handle on the small things, how will you ever get it together to focus on the big things?

Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way – before one began.

I’m not big on to-do lists. Instead, I use e-mail and desktop folders and my online calendar. So when I walk up to my desk, I can focus on the e-mails I’ve flagged and check the folders that are monitoring particular projects and particular blogs.

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

I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

I was a Marine for 41 years, and it wasn’t long enough. We enjoy putting on that uniform.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.

What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.

If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

A little simplification would be the first step toward rational living, I think.

When you campaign and have to participate in so many debates just to the win the nomination of your party, you’ve had a lot of practice. You get to figure out as you go from one debate to another where you made your mistakes. By the time you get to the big debate you’re pretty polished.

There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave.

Actors know, with me they aren’t going to be allowed to rehearse a scene for a couple of hours and then get away with doing 25 takes before we get it right. So they come with their full bag of tricks.

I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

The bottom line is, when people are crystal clear about the most important priorities of the organization and team they work with and prioritized their work around those top priorities, not only are they many times more productive, they discover they have the time they need to have a whole life.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Too often we act – ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we’re giving them children who have, you know, they’re not ready to learn. And if they’re not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they’re behind.

People and organizations don’t grow much without delegation and completed staff work because they are confined to the capacities of the boss and reflect both personal strengths and weaknesses.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

Mostly, my flying has been solo, but the preparation for it wasn’t. Without my husband’s help and encouragement, I could not have attempted what I have. Ours has been a contented and reasonable partnership, he with his solo jobs and I with mine. But always with work and play together, conducted under a satisfactory system of dual control.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

I feel like whatever you’ve done in your career, good or bad, it’s nothing but preparation for the big events to come.

When trouble breaks out, our men and women in uniform, they don’t just sit around thinking about it or talking about it – they act. They put on that uniform. They leave their loved ones behind. They go out there. They give orders. They follow orders. They do whatever it takes to keep our country safe.

I don’t really plan. I’m almost intuitive about things.

I say luck is when an opportunity comes along and you’re prepared for it.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

My preparation is about precision. It is a science.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

My father will anticipate everything. He will leave you and me no chance to do a great and brilliant deed.

Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

Every man, every woman who has to take up the service of government, must ask themselves two questions: ‚Do I love my people in order to serve them better? Am I humble and do I listen to everybody, to diverse opinions in order to choose the best path?‘ If you don’t ask those questions, your governance will not be good.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world.

Time management is an oxymoron. Time is beyond our control, and the clock keeps ticking regardless of how we lead our lives. Priority management is the answer to maximizing the time we have.

WikiLeaks is a service to the population. Assange should get an award for – presidential medal of honor.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.