strategy quotes

I began playing Monopoly for real when I was 26 years old. Today, my wife and I have approximately 1,400 little green houses – each paying us monthly. You do not have to be a rocket scientist or have a Harvard degree to play Monopoly for real.

Many people don’t understand ring control. They think they do until they’re against someone who really understands how to set traps, how to create holes in the octagon that they fall into.

I’ve tried different things through the years to get some play on mainstream. I’ll try to tailor-make it.

To me, we’re marketing hope.

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

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

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

Politics is like football; if you see daylight, go through the hole.

Some of the generals are saying, ‚We’re making progress. We are clearing an area.‘ But you really don’t defeat the Taliban by clearing an area. They move.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

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

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.

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.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

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.

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

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

War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can’t smile, grin. If you can’t grin, keep out of the way till you can.

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

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

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

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.

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.

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

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

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.

It’s not called quitting if you quit while you ahead. It’s about being aware and being strategic enough to know that you got to get out the pool at some point. You got to put your clothes back on and dry off.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

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.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

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.

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.

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

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

Pool, it became clear to me, is all about angles. First, there are simple angles, as you must hit the cue ball to either side when you are not straight on.

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

My business is to prevent the future.

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.

The only way you can beat the lawyers is to die with nothing.

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

Solutions are not the answer.

It is a fine game to play – the game of politics – and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

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

In politics… never retreat, never retract… never admit a mistake.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

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.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

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

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

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.

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.