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.

Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth. We’ll adapt, we’ll train, we’ll advise, we’ll mentor, and we’ll fight, and we’ll fight well.

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.

Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.

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.

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

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

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.

Be Prepared… the meaning of the motto is that a scout must prepare himself by previous thinking out and practicing how to act on any accident or emergency so that he is never taken by surprise.

Football is a game you cannot play without making mistakes.

The future of American film lies on television.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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

I’m bad at picking heroes.

To the man who reads ‚Scouting for Boys‘ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

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

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

I think that at the start of a game, you’re always playing to win, and then maybe if you’re ahead late in the game, you start playing not to lose. The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

I know I’m more on television, and I’m more recognisable than maybe even the players because they run and train, but I just stand there, and my face does all these funny things that everyone can see all the time.

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.

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.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

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.

Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.

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

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.

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.

It’s been my experience in politics that you can try and plan it out: ‚I’m going to hit the three ball which will hit the eight ball.‘ You’ve just got to go run and try to do everything right. And then have a little luck.

These young guys are playing checkers. I’m out there playing chess.

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

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

I know that if I had a television in my flat I would convince myself that everything on it was really interesting. I would say, ‚I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here!‘ is so sociologically fascinating that I think I’d better watch.

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

One of the first duties of a Scout is obedience to authority. He must obey his orders in the first place and put his own amusement or desires in the second.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

The most successful war seldom pays for its losses.

From a young age, I learned to focus on the things I was good at and delegate to others what I was not good at. That’s how Virgin is run. Fantastic people throughout the Virgin Group run our businesses, allowing me to think creatively and strategically.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

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

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

Solutions are not the answer.

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.

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.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

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.

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

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

A Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances.

My business is to prevent the future.

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.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.