James Stockdale Quotes

I was tortured fifteen times, that's total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.

But there were highs as well as lows, it was as though they said everybody was picking on the man who had more practical real life experiences than the whole batch of them put together.

On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

It is in disaster, not success, that the heros and the bums really get sorted out.

I mean, I didn't - I should have demanded attention of the boss maybe, or something like that that might have backfired. This I would just take as it came.

Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.

Leadership must be based on goodwill. Goodwill does not mean posturing and, least of all, pandering to the mob. It means obvious and wholehearted commitment to helping followers.

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

Great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

The worst thing that can happen is death and that's not the worst thing in the world either.

Well, first of all, I was asked by Ross Perot on a telephone call in March of 1992 if, since he had committed on the Larry King Show to becoming a candidate for president, to get on all 50 ballots.

I never had a single conversation about politics with Ross Perot in my life; still haven't.

In order to do something you must be something.

The guy that just arranges things so that the stock market holds up is nobody in my - in my estimation.

Sybil's my wife, and on the first day of October, that's the first time I knew Ross was going to run.

This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.

Entitlement and privelege corrupt.

I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.