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

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

I always wanted to have a headphone line but I feel like I’m going to do more than just headphones eventually, but we want to wake the world up right now with this.

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

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.

Gulf Lesson One is the value of airpower.

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

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

Our favorite holding period is forever.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

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.

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

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

Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.

I do not have a merchandise line. I don’t sell knives or apparel. Though I have been approached to endorse various products from liquor to airlines to automobiles to pharmaceuticals dozens of times, I have managed to resist the temptation.

Solutions are not the answer.

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.

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.

I dislike the concept of ‚chic‘ being the highest compliment for a human being. I’d rather someone be nice than to be chic.

Competitions are a business, first and foremost.

Everybody that’s successful lays a blueprint out.

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.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

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

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.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

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.

All I can do is try to create my own brand and have people appreciate me for that.

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.

The onus is on the managers to send out an attacking formation and to tell their players to be bold.

I believe in the battle-whether it’s the battle of a campaign or the battle of this office, which is a continuing battle.

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

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

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

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.

Economy’s got to get moving, we’ve got to get the unemployment rate down. That may be the defining issue of the campaign.

It takes a smart man to play dumb.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

I suppose Virgin is an unusual brand in that I suspect we’re the only ‚way of life‘ brand in the world. We’re one of maybe the top 30 best known brands in the world, yet if you look at the other 29, they all specialize in one area. Whether it’s Google, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, etc., they all generally specialize in one area.

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.

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.

Apple took the edge off the word ‚computer.‘

I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.

I’m a control freak. If you’re going to slap my name on something, I would like to control it.

I have decided in 2020 to run for president.

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.

There are a whole bunch of roles where people say, ‚Oh, you’re playing yourself.‘ I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Or people say, ‚Oh, man, you just roll out of bed and do that.‘ The work is to make it look effortless. That’s the hard part.

I love going one-on-one with someone. That’s what I do. I’ve never lost. It’s a whole different game, just to have them right in front of you and be able to do whatever you want.

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.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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.

An army marches on its stomach.

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