“Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure.”

The theory of the indirect approach operates on the line of least expectation.

The most dangerous error is failure to recognize our own tendency to error.

The search for the truth for truth’s sake is the mark of the historian.

The hydrogen bomb is not the answer to the Western peoples’ dream of full and final insurance of their security … While it has increased their striking power it has sharpened their anxiety and deepened their sense of insecurity.

With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance.

The easiest and quickest path into the esteem of traditional military authorities is by the appeal to the eye, rather than to the mind. ‘The polish and pipeclay’ school is not yet extinct, and it is easier for the mediocre intelligence to become an authority on buttons, than on tactics.

For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience … indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.

While the nominal strength of a country is represented by its numbers and resources, this muscular development is dependent on the state of its internal organs and nerve-system – upon its stability of control, morale, and supply.

If you wish for peace, understand war.

Direct pressure always tends to harden and consolidate the resistance of an opponent.

The effect to be sought is the dislocation of the opponent’s mind and dispositions – such an effect is the true gauge of an indirect approach.

The more usual reason for adopting a strategy of limited aim is that of awaiting a change in the balance of force … The essential condition of such a strategy is that the drain on him should be disproportionately greater than on oneself.

No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.

The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.

When you have arrived at your country house and have saluted your household, you should make the rounds of the farm the same day, if possible; if not, then certainly the next day.

Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking out how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist.

How warm i feel. How icredibly alive and vibrant and heedless every last inch of me feels next to you.

No matter what you do next, the world needs your energy, your passion, your impatience for progress. Don’t shrink from risk. And tune out those critics and cynics.

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

How did you get in?” “i move in mysterious ways.” “god moves in mysterious ways. You move like lightening-here one moment, gone the next.

A panda walks into a tea room and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man in the next table dead, and walked out.