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 biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

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

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.

Put a love note in his shaving kit before he leaves on a business trip.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

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

I think I have a certain respect for people, you know. And I guess a lot of times I expect that respect to go both ways.

There’s strong data that, within companies, the No. 1 reason for ethical violations is the pressure to meet expectations, sometimes unrealistic expectations.

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

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

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

The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.

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.

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.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

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.‘

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.

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

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

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.

I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.

Housework never really bothered me… what bothered me about it later was that it was expected to be your life… when you’re a housewife, you are constantly interrupted. You have no space in your life. It isn’t the fact that you do the laundry.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn’t happen. If that’s the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

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

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

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.

The battle of Austerlitz is the grandest of all I have fought.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

I can honestly say – and it’s a big surprise to me – that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

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.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Brad was a huge surprise to me. I think we were both the last two people who were looking for a relationship. I certainly wasn’t. I was quite content to be a single mom with Mad.

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

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

When I started analysing games in 2001, I had a DVD recorder. I’d be at home watching the games just on a normal TV, watching what I could and trying to figure out what we would be facing a few weeks later. The problem was, in the team meetings, I’d always have to keep going back and forwards with the footage, trying to get to the right part.

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

When you come to see a picture of mine, I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you won’t be disappointed in me.

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

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.

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.

Drones are just another weapon, and they turn out to be a very effective weapon that puts no American troops at risk, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use them against identified enemy targets.

I fully understand the expectations of the state governments. Thus, I am better placed to work closely with the chief ministers.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Everyone does things differently on offense. Everyone’s goal is to score points.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.