War Strategy Quotes

No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique. ~ Sun Tzu

What worries me is that I am not sure any of the Republicans, or any Democrat, is ready to 'go to the mats.' And, ergo, I am concerned that our current leaders are simply incapable of creating a winning war strategy. ~ Rick Elkin

Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men. ~ Bruce Catton

The good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy. ~ Sun Tzu

In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them. ~ Sun Tzu

But the central point is that any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. ~ Brent Scowcroft

Hence the saying: The enlightened ruler lays his plans well ahead; the good general cultivates his resources. ~ Sun Tzu

All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved. ~ Sun Tzu

If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are. ~ Sun Tzu

The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim. ~ Sun Tzu

If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near. ~ Sun Tzu

Preemption is the right of any nation in order to preserve its National Security; however, preemptive war is a tactic, not a strategy. When used as a strategy preemption dilutes diplomacy, creates an atmosphere of distrust, and promotes regional instability. ~ Ellen Tauscher

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill ~ Sun Tzu

Bestow rewards without regard to rule, issue orders without regard to previous arrangements; and you will be able to handle a whole army as though you had to do with but a single man. ~ Sun Tzu

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to longevity. ~ Sun Tzu

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight ~ Sun Tzu

Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory is won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. ~ Sun Tzu

The two-war strategy was a product of the cold war, when we had to have the ability to fight the Russians on the plains of Europe and fight the Chinese on the Korean peninsula at the same time. That costs an awful lot of money. ~ Joe Klein

Rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him ~ Sun Tzu

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy. ~ Russell Baker

Bush's faith in the rightness of his strategy in the broader war is deep-seated. It is a product of faith. ~ Rich Lowry

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. ~ Sun Tzu

Supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy. ~ Sun Tzu

Society reaps what it sows in the way it nurtures its children, because stress sculpts the brain to exhibit several antisocial behaviors. Stress can set off a ripple of hormonal changes that permanently wire a child's brain to cope with a malevolent world. Through this chain of events, violence and abuse pass from generation to generation as well as from one society to the next. Many world leaders who have been disciplined through anger and cruelty go in to treat their own people abominably, or to bully other nations. As long as we continue to discipline children like this, we will continue to have terrible wars on both the family and the world stage. One very powerful study illustrates the point. Researchers tracked down Germans who, in World War II, risked their own lives by hiding a Jewish person in their house. When interviewed, the researchers found one common feature of all these people. They had all been socialized in ways that respected their personal dignity. ~ Margot Sunderland

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine. ~ Nancy Gibbs

In the end, Buchanan was one of the paleocons to back Trump and many of those who formerly loathed most of what Yiannopoulos and what he represented decided to change their minds and back the winning horse, not only of Trump, but also of the new libertines of the online irreverent 'punk' right. Having lost Buchannan's conservative culture war, they were perhaps strategically right to calculate that the only way they can ever have at least some of their ideas heard again would be to back a groping, lecherous, godless presidential candidate and a libertine figure such as Yiannopoulos and his army of online racist, foul-mouthed, porn-loving nihilists, who in many ways represent everything people like Buchannan are supposed to stand against. The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they're on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right. ~ Angela Nagle

Can you imagine," he went on to say, "what would have been the condition of things eventually if there had been no war, and the South had been allowed to follow its course? Instead of one great, prosperous country with nothing before it but the conquests of peace, a score of petty republics, as in Central and South America, wasting their energies in war with each other pr om revolutions. ~ James Weldon Johnson

You mean something like 'truth or dare'? I haven't played that in a long time." She didn't think he would ever get himself entangled in a game like that, but it was addictive, a compromising icebreaker featuring all the strategy of Poker, minus the cards, mixed with a dash of danger from Russian Roulette, without the revolver. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Creative new health strategies like micro-insurance for poor people or Kangaroo care for pre-term babies are transforming health outcomes in even the most low-resource settings. Dedication and innovation are transforming health care worldwide. ~ Liya Kebede

We experience problem-solving sessions as war zones, we view competing ideas as enemies, and we use problems as weapons to blame and defeat opposition forces. No wonder we can't come up with real lasting solutions! ~ Margaret J. Wheatley

Finally, Europe's post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities - particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna - were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called 'the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe' was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms - but it was real, and it survived into living memory.
Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example - represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugos ~ Tony Judt

Wars are never fought for one reason," he said. "They are fought for dozens of reasons, in a muddle. ~ T.H. White

The world,' he said, 'grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief of apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history, in archaeology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of antiquity, by the rudest savage of today, by the Christian, the Pagan, the Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces is condemned as a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool. ~ Amelia B. Edwards

Well, Mercy was a talker, friendly in his fury, and something about that strategy always got him results. That, or it was just because he was fucking huge and liked to use an ice pick. Either ~ Lauren Gilley

I wanted a racially just society. I wanted to end wars. I wanted to end white supremacy. I wanted to create a world that was based on egalitarianism, sharing, racial justice. ~ Bill Ayers

Humans without humanity, a war-torn world for eternity ~ Mouloud Benzadi

The obvious thing for the cavalryman to do is to accept the fighting machine as a partner, and prepare to meet more fully the demands of future warfare. ~ George S. Patton

What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were "political" and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Do we want science at any price? ~ Eistein, Albert

I am a Quaker. And as everyone knows, Quakers, for 300 years, have, on conscientious ground, been against participating in war. I was sentenced to three years in federal prison because I could not religiously and conscientiously accept killing my fellow man. ~ Bayard Rustin

We never really know what we want until after we get it. If after we get it, it makes life more miserable, we know that isn't what we wanted. If it makes our life wonderful, we know this is a strategy which will meet out need. That's why Paul Tillich, the theologian says we need to sin courageously. You ask for what you want, hoping to meet your needs. If you get it and it makes life worse, you learn that this isn't what I want. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count. ~ Gloria Steinem

Once you open that door to a values conversation, it's going to undercut a right-wing economic agenda, which values wealth over work and favors the rich over the poor, or resorts to war as the first resort and not the last. ~ Jim Wallis

It is a fool of a shepherd who culls his dogs. ~ Jefferson Smith

Yesterday I, along with a bipartisan Congressional Delegation of lawmakers, inspected the detention facilities at Guantanamo used to house individuals detained in the War on Terrorism. ~ Jim Ryun

In January 1951, high commissioner of occupied Germany John McCloy announced that only five of the 15 death sentences from the Nuremberg judgments would be carried out. He then reduced the sentences of 64 out of the remaining 74 war criminals. One third of these were to be released immediately. He also reduced the sentences of all remaining convicted doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates. McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. ~ Carol Rutz

A woman with a newborn baby is too starry-eyed to see a wealthy man's cannon fodder or a cheap source of slave labor. ~ Milton William Cooper

War often breaks out when there is the most talk of peace. ~ Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

Auschwitz cries out with the pain of immense suffering and pleads for a future of respect, peace and encounter among peoples. ~ Pope Francis

I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Back on the block they probably call Big Al "Fat Albert" but here in the Nam we don't insult our friends. ~ Derrick Wolf

Lord Tierney was furious. But when he saw how his sister had suffered, his anger shifted instead toward Rome. "If it weren't for this new menace on the horizon," he thundered, "I'd declare war on those haughty deceivers this instant!"

Marcus stepped forward. "Kyrie, I don't think - "

"Then don't! ~ Jennifer McKeithen

We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over. ~ Gerald Bard Tjoflat

Ares ever loves to pluck all the fairest flower of an armed host. ~ Aeschylus

Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, and I am pleased he is no longer running Iraq. But the war was wrong. ~ Ed Balls

Do you think we should put terrorists' opinions in the
media?"
"Yes," replied the Avatar. "The most basic need of any human
being is the need to communicate. If you shut down the nonviolent
channels of communication, people will find alternate
channels.Terrorism is communication disguised as warfare. If you
treat it as war, you cannot stop it. When you treat it as communication,
you have a chance to replace it with something less
lethal. ~ Scott Adams

Today, the optimum financial strategy for most technology entrepreneurs is to raise money from angels and plan an early exit to a large company in just a few years for under $30 million. ~ Basil Peters

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed, - knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags. ~ Wilfred Owen

Love without risk is an impossibility, like war without death. ~ Alain Badiou

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. ~ George Orwell

Compare Holland with Russia; you see only marshy and sterile islands in the former, which rise from the center of the ocean: a small republic which is only 48 miles length by 40 wide. But this small body is the very nerve-center of the region: immense people live in it, and these industrious people are both powerful and rich. They shook the yoke of the Spanish domination, which was then the most formidable monarchy of Europe. The trade of this republic extends to the ends of the world; and new trade appears almost immediately; it can maintain in times of war an army fifty thousand men, without counting a many and well maintained fleet. ~ Frederick The Great

Frank Zhang, you should know!" Frank flinched. "I should?" "A son of Ares stood here!" Hedge cried indignantly. "I'm Roman ... so Mars, actually." "Whatever! Famous spot in the American Civil War!" "I'm Canadian, actually. ~ Rick Riordan

We are all familiar with the argument: Make war dreadful enough, and there will be no war. And we none of us believe it. ~ John Galsworthy

America's real plan is to fuel a civil war, while the national plan is for all Lebanese to live in peace with one another. There will be no return to civil war. All the political powers as well as the media must work to reduce religious tensions and make everyone understand that they will not allow Lebanon to be destroyed again. ~ Hassan Nasrallah

'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre. ~ Adrian McKinty

I've never killed men with so little regard. And it frightens me how easy I find it in war. There is no ambiguity here, no violation of moral creed. These people are warColors. They kill me or I kill them. It's simpler than the Passage. ~ Pierce Brown

If I had my way, this war would never have been commenced. If I had been allowed my way this war would have been ended before this. ~ Abraham Lincoln