“As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next 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.

To foster the people’s willing spirit is often as important as to possess the more concrete forms of power.

In the case of a state that is seeking not conquest but the maintenance of its security, the aim is fulfilled if the threat is removed – if the enemy is led to abandon his purpose.

The unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.

It is only to clear from history that states rarely keep faith with each other, save in so far (and so long) as their promises seem to them to combine with their interests.

[The] aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this. In other words, dislocation is the aim of strategy.

Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance.

The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move – so that, as in ju-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.

The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.

The harder the fighting and the longer the war, the more the infantry, and in fact all the arms, lean on the gunners.

This tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better,we’ve called the military error.

These UFOs are interplanetary devices systematically observing the earth, either manned or under remote control, or both.

We turned our back on Israel, our ally. You know, and a situation like that, of course [Barack]Obama’s not going to be able to do anything. I would shore up our military first, because if you don’t get the military right, nothing else is going to work.

A Marine should be sworn to the patient endurance of hardships, like the ancient knights; and it is not the least of these necessary hardships to have to serve with sailors.

Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.

There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifery.

We need to be doing lots of other things with the resources that we have. So economic power works just as well as military power, perhaps even better. And speaking of that, our Military needs to be upgraded.