Surprise Attacks Quotes

Unlike previous wars, our enemy now is a stateless network of religious extremists. They do not obey the laws of war, they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians. They have no armed forces per se, no territory or citizens to defend and no fear of dying during their attacks. Information is our primary weapon against this enemy, and intelligence gathered from captured operatives is perhaps the most effective means of preventing future attacks. ~ John Yoo

Jules: Why are you on the floor?
Emma: I've heard roling out of bed in the morning helps you build up resistance to surprise attacks.
Jules: Oh yeah? What does screaming "holy crap!" do?
Emma: That part's optional. ~ Cassandra Clare

Hunding, stop skulking in the hallway and get in here."
The bellhop poked his head around the doorway. "I wasn't skulking," he said defensively. "I was lingering."
"Come in. I need you to do three things. One: Find a way to track Thor's FitnessKnut. Report his whereabouts at all times."
"Won't he just circle the worlds in order?"
I made a face. "Thor's sense of direction is terrible. His path will likely be erratic. Moving on. Two: Have squads of einherjar launch surprise attacks on the Bifrost. I want to know that Heimdall is on guard."
"Very good, sir. And the third thing?"
"Inform the thanes that as of tomorrow, I will be unavailable for a while." I transformed my appearance from a rugged one-eyed god of wisdom to a beautiful two-eyed woman clad in chain mail. "I will be living with my Valkyries to decide for myself which of them deserves to be captain."
Hunding raised a hairy eyebrow. "An idea from Utgard-Loki, Lord Odin?"
"Wisdom can be gleaned from any source if one only looks hard enough." I paused, thinking. "Let's put that on a T-shirt. And, Hunding?"
"My lord?"
I transformed back into my true form. "Download cute baby goat videos to my phablet. I must learn what all the fuss is about. ~ Rick Riordan

Al Qaeda operates by launching surprise attacks on civilian targets with the goal of massive casualties. Our only means for preventing future attacks, which could use WMDs, is by acquiring information that allows for pre-emptive action. ~ John Yoo

The kingdom of God dawns in trailer parks and refugee camps. That shouldn't surprise us. The kingdom came to us not from a boardroom or a literary guild, but from a feeding trough and an execution stake. ~ Russell D. Moore

The man in her dream would ride up and surprise her on his horse ... saying her beauty pierced such a great place in his heart. ~ Kaye Gibbons

The world tried to crush you, and you refused to be shattered. You've recovered from every setback a stronger person, rising form the ashes only to astonish everyone around you. And you will continue to surprise and confuse those who underestimate you. It is an inevitability. A forgone conclusion. But you should know now that being a leader is a thankless occupation. Few will ever be grateful for what you do or for the changes you implement. Their memories will be short, convenient. Your every success will be scruntinized. Your accomplishments will be brushed aside, breeding only greater expectations from those around you. Your power will push you further away from your friends. You will be made to feel lonely. Lost. You will long for validation from those you once admired, agonizing between pleasing old friends and doing what is right. But you must never, ever let the idiots into your head. They will only lead you astray. ~ Tahereh Mafi

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form. ~ Victor Hugo

Following a meeting with Hitler, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, a man who had 'courageously criticized the Nazi attacks on the Catholic Church' - went away convinced that Hitler was deeply religious. ~ Ian Kershaw

Two lines must meet at a point. Therefore there are only two surprises here. ~ Nathan Seiberg

If you are a big company, a big website, and lots of users come to your website, you will have attacks, and you have to deal with that. It just cannot be a reason to take actions to exit certain markets. ~ Robin Li

Ready?" he asked. He motioned for her to look to the sky.
She'd been on enough long walks with her father to know it was time to open her mind. Their times in nature usually held a secret surprise. It could be anything, really - a rainbow touching the snow or heart-shaped shade cast by a pair of trees. Anything. Today, the gift was being outside the second it started to snow.
"Ooh, Daddy! Look, it's like a salt shaker!" She stuck her tongue out for the newborn snowflakes.
Blake followed her lead. Snow tasted sweeter with Emme around. ~ Debra Anastasia

We walk inside, and I stop short. Our booth, the one we always sit in, has pale pink balloons tied around it. There's a round cake in the center of the table, tons of candles, pink frosting with sprinkles and Happy Birthday, Lara Jean scrawled in white frosting. Suddenly I see people's heads pop up from under the booths and from behind menus--all of our friends, still in their prom finery: Lucas, Gabe, Gabe's date Keisha, Darrell, Pammy, Chris. "Surprise!" everyone screams.
I spin around. "Oh my God, Peter!"
He's still grinning. He looks at his watch. "It's midnight. Happy birthday, Lara Jean."
I leap up and hug him. "This is just exactly what I wanted to do on my prom night birthday and I didn't even know it." Then I let go of him and run over to the booth.
Everyone gets out and hugs me. "I didn't even know people knew it was my birthday tomorrow! I mean today!" I say.
"Of course we knew it was your birthday," Lucas says.
Darrell says, "My boy's been planning this for weeks."
"It was so endearing," Pammy says. "We called me to ask what kind of pan he should use for the cake."
Chris says, "He called me, too. I was like, how the hell should I know?"
"And you!" I hit Chris on the arm. "I thought you were leaving to go clubbing!"
"I still might after I steal some fries. My night's just getting started, babe." She pulls me in for a hug and gives me a kiss on the cheek. "Happy birthday, girl."
I turn to Peter and say, "I can't ~ Jenny Han

Doc Daneeka gave him a pill and a shot that put him to sleep for twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up and went to see him, Doc Daneeka gave him another pill and a shot that put him to sleep for another twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up again and went to see him, Doc Daneeka made ready to give him another pill and a shot. "How long are you going to keep giving me those pills and shots?" Yossarian asked him. "Until you feel better." "I feel all right now." Doc Daneeka's fragile suntanned forehead furrowed with surprise. "Then why don't you put some clothes on? Why are you walking around naked?" "I don't want to wear a uniform any more." Doc Daneeka accepted the explanation and put away his hypodermic syringe. "Are you sure you feel all right?" "I feel fine. I'm just a little logy from all those pills and shots you've been giving me. ~ Joseph Heller

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense. ~ Shirley Jackson

To be Kaspar Hauser is to long, at every moment of your dubious existence, with every fiber of your questionable being, not to be Kaspar Hauser. It's to long to leave yourself completely behind, to vanish from your own sight. Does this surprise you? It is of course what you have taught me to desire. And I am a diligent student. With your help I have furnished myself inside and out. My thoughts are yours. These words are yours. Even my black and bitter tears are yours, for I shed them at the thought of the life I never had, which is to say, your life, ladies and gentlemen of Nuremberg. My deepest wish is not to be an exception. My deepest wish is not to be a curiosity, an object of wonder. It is to be unremarkable. To become you - to sink into you - to merge with you until you cannot tell me from yourselves; to be uninteresting; to be nothing at all; to experience the ecstasy of mediocrity - is it so much to ask? You who have helped me to advance so far, won't you lead me to the promised land, the tranquil land of the ordinary, the banal, the boring? Not to be Kaspar Hauser, not to be the enigma of Europe, not to be the wild boy in the tower, the man without a childhood, the young man without a youth, the monster born in the middle of his life, but to be you, to be you, to be nothing but you! This is my vision of paradise. And although the very existence of such a vision reveals nothing so much as my distance, which widens into an abyss even as I try to fling myself across, st ~ Steven Millhauser

One forgets all through the year how lovely spring really is and so it comes as a surprise every time. ~ L.M. Montgomery

This is supposed to be a surprise - a huge, life-changing surprise that could make or break our future. Or my kneecaps if George decides he really does hate me. ~ Tara Sivec

Perhaps the gods will surprise us and it will be neither."
"A true tragedy."
"Of epic proportions."
"Two longstanding rivals."
"And only one robe to bear."
"Who will win?" Darren's tone was wry. "The handsome prince?"
I grinned. "Or his valiant betrothed? ~ Rachel E. Carter

They may be nothing like you, he had written, they may surprise you, they may even repel you when their behavior is out of control, when they climb out their windows and drink underage and break every rule, but you will love them in a way you had not thought possible before, no matter who they turn out to be. ~ Alice Hoffman

Let's see... "Advanced Flanking Theory", by U.R. Skrood. "Fighting on the Grid", by Minnie Churse. "Moving on Diagonals", by Wun and Ahaff. Ah ha! Here it is: "Attacks of Opportunity Explained", by Ben Dover and Taye Kitt. ~ Rich Burlew

When lovers are in love, they don't diminish. When wanderers wander, they do not diminish. The world lays itself out beautiful before them; a rich tapestry to explore; with love in abundance. But for this, a wanderer must be favored by Fortune. Fortune is not "riches," it is "Poetic Beauty" that comes by surprise! - like a ship coming in from Dover ... ~ Roman Payne

Surprise is the tool of the Devil and it is the greatest power of the evil forces! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. ~ George Gilder

Actually, I didn't make the claim that Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. Someone felt the design of Ruby follows that philosophy, so they started saying that. I didn't bring that up, actually. ~ Yukihiro Matsumoto

My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age. ~ Gail Sheehy

I was on a bus once, it was in the middle of the night, and I had a box of crackers and a can of Easy Cheese. It was dark, and it was a surprise how much cheese I had applied on each cracker. That's why they should have a glow-in-the-dark version of Easy Cheese. It's not like the product has any integrity to begin with. If you buy a room-temperature cheese that you squeeze out of a can, you probably won't get mad because it glows in the dark too. ~ Mitch Hedberg

Plot twist: everything goes exactly as planned. ~ Criss Jami

He found, quite to his surprise, that he was happy. Not merely happy in Demelza's happiness but in himself. He couldn't think why. The condition just existed within him. ~ Winston Graham

Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end. ~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

One thing we were taught as templars is that, in moments of doubt, you must always give people the opportunity to do good. Sometimes they surprise you. Sometimes they don't."
"Which one's the surprise?"
Now it was the templar's turn to offer a small, unfinished smile, barely visible in the dark. "That anyone ever actually gives someone else the chance. ~ Liane Merciel

Humor does depend on surprise, and the things that people remember as the funniest things in the world, you look at later and you go, "What? What was that all about?" ~ Matt Groening

You get used to people being a certain way; you depend on it. And when they surprise you, for better or worse, it can shake you to your core. ~ Sarah Dessen

He turns around, and when he sees me standing there, he looks scared. That's something useful. Because I'm not going to let him go. He may think he was lying when he said all those nice things to lure me home. But I know different. I know Nick can't lie like that. I know that as he recited those words, he realized the truth. Ping! Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer...
"We're a sick, fucking toxic Möbius strip, Amy. We weren't ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way. You don't really love me, Amy. You don't even like me. Divorce me. Divorce me, and let's try to be happy.'
'I won't divorce you, Nick. I won't. And I swear to you, if you try to leave, I will devote my life to making your life as awful as I can. And you know I can make it awful. ~ Gillian Flynn

I think I'm different. I've got alpha, baby ... I think I can find the profits of surprise, the yield of real knowledge. Everyone says that, of course, but most investors are all beta
just volatility, just the random motion of the surf ... they get killed. To generate alpha, I need help, direction, signposts, analysts, and sometimes even brandy-toting salesmen. ~ George Gilder

Projecting weakness will not make us safer or discourage attacks against us. We need to show leadership and strength by demonstrating that we will not tolerate violent acts against our people, and we will not leave our citizens or our interests vulnerable to an attack. ~ Tom Rooney

While it may be true that the UAE has been an ally since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the American people know it has also harbored and aided some of the al Qaeda agents who were involved in that attack. ~ Bart Gordon

My own tears caught me by surprise, and I turned away before he could see them. Everyone leaves. If I've learned one thing in life that it was that. They might die. They might betray your trust. They might stay until I've got too hard or inconvenient. But in the end, the people you cared about always leave. ~ Suzanne Johnson

War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. ~ Karl Kraus

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius ('nobody's land'), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history.
In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of 'a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]'. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn't exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter 'p' does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, 'f' stands for 'p', and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.) ~ Yuval Noah Harari

I understand that this has taken a lot of politicians by surprise. But we believe that this is an important and right step for the steel industry. ~ Lakshmi Mittal

Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but scores of eager retailers who can claim they are just passing on the news. Should the gossip - and here I have in mind malicious gossip - be challenged, everyone can disavow responsibility for having originated it. The Malay term for gossip and rumor, khabar angin (news on the wind), captures the diffuse quality of responsibility that makes such aggression possible.
The character of gossip that distinguishes it from rumor is that gossip consists typically of stories that are designated to ruin the reputation of some identifiable person or persons. If the perpetrators remain anonymous, the victim is clearly specified. There is, arguably, something of a disguised democratic voice about gossip in the sense that it is propagated only to the extent that others find it in their interest to retell the story.13 If they don't, it disappears. Above all, most gossip is a discourse about social rules that have been violated. A person's reputation can be damaged by stories about his tightfistedness, his insulting words, his cheating, or his clothing only if the public among whom such tales circulate have shared standards of generosity, polite speech, honesty, and appropriate dress. Without an accepted normat ~ James C. Scott

I stare at the water. He stares at me. I can feel his gaze burning into my face, and I shift my head again, smiling wryly.

"Let's hear it."

"Hear what?"

"Some more lies. You know, how last night was just you doing me a favor, you don't really want me, yada, yada." I wave my hand.

To my surprise, he laughs.

"Oh my God. Was that a laugh? Reed Royal laughs, folks. Someone call the Vatican because an honest-to-God miracle has occurred."

That gets me another chuckle. "You're so annoying," he grumbles.

"Yeah, but you still like me."

He goes quiet. I think he's going to stay that way, but then he curses under his breath and says, "Yeah, maybe I do."

I feign amazement. "Two miracles in one night? Is the world ending? ~ Erin Watt, Paper Princess

Being economical with the truth about yourself during a relationship can have tragic results. In a world where people of same families rarely meet, it will not be a surprise in the future for cousins, half brothers and sisters to get into relationships and even get married. Let us have bonding time to avoid situations where members of the same families may get intimate for heaven's sake. ~ Boniface Kamau Zablon.

Hitchcock: Definitely, I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women. I feel that the English women, the Swedes, the northern Germans, and Scandinavians are a great deal more exciting than the Latin, the Italian, and the French women. Sex should not be advertised. An English girl, looking like a schoolteacher, is apt to get into a cab with you and, to your surprise, she'll probably pull a man's pants open. ~ Francois Truffaut

He looked so - what was it that gave him his irresistible charm? He looked so accessible. That was it. A great simple truth struck me with surprise: charm is availability. ~ Elaine Dundy

When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me. ~ Clint Eastwood

Yes, what has happened is we have moved from responding to these terrorist attacks as acts of civil disobedience to getting to the point after September 11 that we said, no, this is not just civil disobedience, this is an act of war. ~ Marsha Blackburn

AL QAEDA SPENT ABOUT $500,000 TO PRODUCE 9/11, WHEREAS THE direct losses of that day's destruction plus the costs of the American response to the attacks were $3.3 trillion. In other words, for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks, the United States spent $7 million.1 The costs of 9/11 equal one-fifth of the US national debt. In 2006, Hezbollah fired a precision-guided cruise missile at an Israeli ship ~ Moises Naim