Grand Strategy Quotes

There is no grand strategy. My sensibilities push me in a certain direction. Other actors have different sensibilities. That's all. I think it really is that simple. There's no grand strategy. There are so many variables that I have no control over. I sign on to movies I want to watch, as a fan. ~ Shia Labeouf

We do have a grand strategy," says Zeese, who was the spokesman for Ralph Nader's 2004 presidential campaign. "Nonviolent movements shift power by attacking the columns that hold the power structure in place. Those columns are the military, police, media, business, workers, youth, faith groups, NGOs, and civil servants. Every time we deal with the police, we have that in mind. The goal is not to hit them, hit them, hit them, and weaken them. The goal is to pull people from those columns to our side. We want the police to know that we understand they're not the 1 percent. The goal is not to get every police officer, but to get enough police so that you have a division. ~ Chris Hedges

In his earlier campaigns his logistical strategy was direct and devoid of subtlety. The cause would appear to be, first, that in the youthful Alexander, bred to kingship and triumph, there was more of the Homeric hero than in the other great captains of history; and, still more perhaps, that he had such justifiable confidence in the superiority of his instrument and his own battle handling of it that he felt no need to dislocate preparatorily his adversaries' strategic balance. His lessons for posterity lie at the two poles-grand strategy and tactics. ~ B.H. Liddell Hart

This is the grand strategy of satan in today's modern world - to make man believe that he does not exist. Christians therefore never put up a fight or any form of defense against him. Many even end up blaming God for their miseries unaware of the hidden enemy striking them in the many areas of their lives. ~ Jose Francisco C. Syquia

That image of a chessboard - an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy - has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones. ~ Sam Tanenhaus

I'm going to be specific so you can render your verdict. Let's go to North Africa, she was the chief engineer of the disastrous overthrow of [Muamar] Qaddafi in Libya. Libya today after Hillary Clinton's grand strategy? Their economy's in ruins. There's death and violence on the streets, and ISIS is now dominating that country. ~ Chris Christie

I think there's a tendency, and it's an understandable tendency, to imagine that China makes decisions out of a grand strategy. The reality is that I think China today is operating, most of all, based on its domestic needs. ~ Evan Osnos

In September 2002 the Bush administration announced its National Security Strategy, which declared the right to resort to force to eliminate any perceived challenge to US global hegemony, which is to be permanent. The new grand strategy aroused deep concern worldwide, even within the foreign policy elite at home. Also in September, a propaganda campaign was launched to depict Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the United States and to insinuate that he was responsible for the 9 – 11 atrocities and was planning others. ~ Noam Chomsky

One does not have to be without sin to castigate someone else for being a rapist or murderer" (386). ~ Kenneth Pollack

George W. Bush has much to evaluate: he has presided over the most sweeping redesign of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. ~ John Lewis Gaddis

prophecy directed at the past, the yearning for ancestors projected into the future – that is Nietzsche's divine feeling of humanity. the mature individual who, conscious of of his responsability, shoulders the entire burden of human tradition, who is the highest point in the arch of the bridge spanning what was and what will be, the divine moment "on the high pass" – like Zarathustra "between two oceans, traveling between the past and the future like a heavy cloud" – that is Nietzsche's man of the future humanity. the poet is, in his view, the creator of the past, the founder of "all that remains". the philosopher, however, and the sage are preachers and seekers of the future: "whoever has became wise reflecting on old origins" Zarathustra says "will eventually look for sources of the future and for new origins". to redeem the Past by interpreting it affirmatively as the cradle of the Future. to work at constructing the future by building a vaulted crypt that will provide a permanent sanctuary for the powers of belief throught centuries – with that, the grand fusion takes place that merges Nietzsche's early "philological" ideals and the Dionysian ecstatic dream of Zarathustra's demanding Will. ~ Ernst Bertram

Thrawn smiled - a smile that sent a shiver up Pellaeon's back. "Why, the only puzzle worth solving, of course," the Grand Admiral said softly. "The complete, total, and utter destruction of the Rebellion. ~ Timothy Zahn

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

History is filled with inferior brands outselling superior ones thanks to better branding. Only superior branding has the power to overcome and reverse this (and superior products and services deserve superior branding). ~ David Brier

But Jackson was experienced enough to know that the scale of the challenge ahead was totally unrealistic, yet the alternative probably meant utter and complete ruination for him. The whole entire enterprise was delusional. Michael surely knew it, but likely hoped that at some point an exit strategy would magically appear. He was a frail, deeply insecure, vulnerable, unfit, 50-year-old with a chronic addiction to a wide variety of prescription medicines, and the whole tour would have seemed just what it was: an impossible mountain for him to climb. ~ Matt Richards

I have to hand it to the patriarchy. It has been a brilliant and comprehensive strategy to keep women under control, to create so many hurdles and levels of difficulty - both overt and covert, both in the workplace and in the home, both through the tax system and the lack of services - that women must expend much of their energy just overcoming them and have little left over for battling promotion and higher wages. Exhaustion is a feminist issue. ~ Jane Caro

And on and on, and it all sounded completely, horribly plausible. Any one of a thousand options promised - basically guaranteed - a rich, fulfilling, challenging future for him. So why did Quentin feel like he was looking around frantically for another way out? Why was he still waiting for some grand adventure to come and find him? The professors Quentin talked to about it didn't seem concerned at all. They didn't get what the problem was. What should he do? Why, anything he wanted to! ~ Lev Grossman

My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time. It's the way I've discovered to not do a damn thing. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours, then half hours, then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time to bite size. It's like dealing with losing a man. If you can bear it for one minute, then you can swallow two, then five, then another five and on and on. If I don't want to think about my life, I don't have to think about life at all, just hold for one minute, then two, then five, then another five, before you know it, a month can pass and you don't even notice because you've only been counting minutes. ~ Marlon James

Think like a publisher, not a marketer. ~ David Meerman Scott

How could the human heart hold within its chambers at the same moment such grand measures of nobility and baseness? He wrote in his notebook: Indians at Omaha station: I am ashamed for this thing we call civilization. ~ Nancy Horan

For me, 'The Social Network' isn't about Facebook. It certainly isn't about how people use it. It's about a flawed character and his pursuit of that grand idea that defines him and validates his life and how far he'll go to get it, and the repercussions that come as a result of that - what he gives up in the process. ~ Trent Reznor

I suspect they needed to know that there was an enemy who hated them and wanted them dead, because the opposite--that there was no grand, evil scheme against them, merely that the world was a massive, complex organism that perhaps had little use for them--was too terrifying to bear. It reminded me of the Elie Wiesel quote" "The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference." Hatred they could deal with, indifference was horrifying. SO rather than being insignificant ciphers in a vast and demeaning world, they became feared partisans in an existential struggle. ~ Vegas Tenold

Containment is a strategy for losers! But as General George S. Patton famously observed, Americans play to win all the time. Americans don't play to lose. ~ Bobby Jindal

There is an absolute need for organizations to innovate, grow, transform, and reinvent themselves faster than ever before. ~ Kaihan Krippendorff

The Universe had no obligation to create anything at all, yet life managed to make a grand entrance on at least one tiny pale blue dot in a truly spectacular way. ~ Mathew Anderson

I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor. Quite often during the past several years I have felt myself a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious of the moment's high issues, oblivious to its data, alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple's ranch, the freeway sniper who feels "real bad" about picking off the family of five, the hustlers, the insane, the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations, the sullen lurkers in doorways, the lost children, all the ignorant armies jostling in the night. Acquaintances read The New York Times, and try to tell me the news of the world. I listen to call-in shows. ~ Joan Didion

They're talking about Marthe, Maître Gaultier's assistant. What's she like? Pretty?' 'She's pretty,' said the man. Philippa studied the taciturn face. 'Oh, I see,' she said. 'Mr Blyth wants her all to himself?' For a moment, she thought it hadn't worked. Then the man gave a snort.

'Mr Blyth want her? He held us up at Avignon for two days refusing to go on until she was sent back home, but Gaultier wouldn't do it, and he had to give in. Mr Blyth and Gaultier haven't spoken since. Aye,' said Jerott's man morosely. 'It's going to be a grand, sociable trip. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

In politics, nothing good ever comes from the unexpected. ~ Chris Matthews

What are you looking at?"

"I was thinking about becoming a lady of the night."

"What?"

"There's actually an ad looking for one. Can you believe it? It pays a grand a week."

"Shit, for a grand a week, "I'll become a lady of the night. ~ L.A. Fiore

You see? There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. Indeed that's what we provide in our own modest, humble, insignificant - (sighs deeply). Oh, fuck it.

-M. Gustave, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) ~ Wes Anderson

We see anything actionable, we don't react to it. We consider it. ~ Bryan Larrick

It is the grand misfortune of my life that nobody will let me alone. ~ Wilkie Collins

When Alekhine recognizes the weakness in his position he has a tendency to become very aggressive. Patient defence is not for him if he can see the slightest chance of creating an attack. Yet sound strategy often demands that you submit to the opponent's will so as to strengthen your weaknesses and get rid of defects in your game. ~ Emanuel Lasker

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. ~ Susannah Sandlin

This is a dream from when I was kid. I'm playing tennis almost 18 years, and of course everybody's dream is to play the final of a Grand Slam. ~ Agnieszka Radwanska

There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government's decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

My goal is that after seeing 'Grand Canyon,' every person in the audience will go home knowing they have to conserve water: even something as simple as installing a low-flow toilet or showerhead, or turning off the faucet while they're brushing their teeth. ~ Greg MacGillivray

My poem is called 'The Grand Inquisitor' - an absurd thing, but I want you to hear it. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sometimes when I'm facing a horrendous week or am upset over a perceived slight, I remind myself that I won't remember it (much less care about it) one month, six months, or a year from now. (The more extreme version of this strategy is to use the deathbed criterion: Will it matter when you're on your deathbed?) ~ Sonja Lyubomirsky

Being a sensual woman gives you the Desirability Advantage; this simply means it essentially enhances your allure, elegance, and lusciousness. ~ Lebo Grand

The world is grand, awfully big and astonishingly beautiful, frequently thrilling. ~ Dorothy Kilgallen

Process improvement programs are like teaching people how to fish. Strategy maps and scorecards teach people where to fish. ~ Robert S. Kaplan

Always remember, Brand exists in the consumers mind, so the brand is owned by the user. ~ Abraham Varghese

I couldn't talk. Why couldn't I…

The room was tipping over now.

I heard muffled voices.

Then it was all black again.

I fainted.

In the grand scheme of things, it was embarrassing, but survivable. ~ Tijan

Every difficulty requires new strategy to overcome it. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita