- Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment?
- Defining marriage is a power that should be left to the states. Moreover, no state should be forced to recognize a marriage that is not within its own laws, Constitution, and legal precedents.
- Don't let that weapon technology proliferate. Don't let Saddam Hussein get capability for nuclear or chemical weapons, because he's already shown a willingness to use any weapon at his disposal.
- Energy and environmental regulation, transportation, and broadband policy all benefit when legislators have a basic grounding in the technical concepts behind business models, products, and innovation.
- For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.
- Growing up, I was encouraged to get a good education, get a real job doing something I enjoyed, and, should the opportunity present itself, consider public service as just that: a chance to serve, not an end in itself.
- I understand the process of politics and the game of television.
- It worries me about our unwillingness to really address reforms and modernization in Medicare. This thing was designed 37 years ago. It has not evolved to keep pace with current medical technology.
- Politicians are usually the first to forget that if you assume someone else is acting in bad faith, they will do the same to you. Questioning motives poisons the well.
- The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.
- The precise point at which a tax deduction becomes a 'loophole' or a tax incentive becomes a 'subsidy for special interests' is one of the great mysteries of politics.
- The voters are going to decide in November who is going to fix their personal family dismay over not having jobs in America. They are going to pick Mitt Romney.
- This is technology that will not go away. And to risk it moving into the hands of a terrorist group like al Qaeda or to other focused enemies of the United States, would have tragic consequences.
- We will have to continue to improve our human intelligence system-something that was, unfortunately, lacking in the years which led up to September 11. This is going to be a continuing process of change.
- When we're talking about technology that involves weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, there has to be an element of preemption.
- And I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead.
- Because parents have power over children. They feel they have to do what their parents say. But the love of money is the root of all evil. And this is a sweet child. And to see him turn like this, this isn't him. This is not him.
- Everyone who knows me will know the truth, which is that my children come first in my life and that I would never harm any child.
- Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And - and we have bus loads of kids, who don't get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it.
- I just wish I could understand my father.
- I love my family very much. I wish I could see them a little more often than I do. But we understand because we're a show business family and we all work.
- I rememeber one time we were getting ready to go to South America and everything was packed up and in the car ready to go and I hid and I was crying because I really did not want to go, I wanted to play. I did not want to go.
- Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.
- People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.
- The Bee Gees who are brilliant, I just love great music.
- The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.
- The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.
- There were times when I had great times with my brothers, pillow fights and things, but I was, used to always cry from loneliness.
- Well, especially now I come to realize - and then - I would do my schooling which was three hours with a tutor and right after that I would go to the recording studio and record, and I'd record for hours and hours until it's time to go to sleep.
- When I see children, I see the face of God. That's why I love them so much. That's what I see.
- A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.
- Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws.
- Expose yourself to your deepest fear after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
- Film spectators are quiet vampires.
- I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos-especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom... Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.
- I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.
- If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
- I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.
- It's like gambling somehow. You go out for a night of drinking and you don't know where your going to end up the next day. It could work out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice.
- Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.
- Love cannot save you from your own fate.
- Music inflames temperament.
- People fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend.
- Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.
- Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts.
- The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
- The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
- This is the strangest life I've ever known.
- We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
- When you make your peace with authority, you become authority.
- A positive attitude can really make dreams come true - it did for me.
- All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
- Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.
- I didn't know a time when there wasn't a war because I spent all my time from the age of two or three to eight in a coal cellar really.
- I left school on my 15th birthday.
- I like change. There's something Buddhist about it - continuous change is wonderful.
- I love learning new techniques.
- I was surrounded by strong women so it had never even occurred to me that women were anything other than equal to men.
- If you're curious, London's an amazing place.
- I'm not mad about movies, there are too many people involved in the making of them, and they lack a definitive creative focus.
- In New York, everyone's desperate for success, desperate for money and desperate to be accepted, but in London they're more laid back about things like that.
- It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.
- It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary.
- London changes because of money. It's real estate. If they can build some offices or expensive apartments they will, it's money that changes everything in a city.
- Photography is more about money now but then so are most things.
- The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.
- The skull is nature's sculpture.
- The trouble with people like Tony Blair is they get confused, they think intelligence is education when they're two different things.
- To get rich, you have to be making money while you're asleep.
- When I stop working, I go out and start working again. Most people paint a picture, or whatever they do, and go home. For me, it has to be continuous.
- Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
- Be obscure clearly.
- Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
- English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.
- Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.
- Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.
- I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
- I see nothing in space as promising as the view from a Ferris wheel.
- I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.
- It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
- Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
- Old age is a special problem for me because I've never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself - a lad of about 19.
- Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.
- The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change and we all instinctively avoid it.
- The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.
- The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
- To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.
- Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
- When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy today they peer beyond the seven seas, bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.
- Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
- Writing is hard work and bad for the health.
- An Army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every change in the rules which impairs the principle weakens the army.
- But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
- Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
- Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
- He belonged to that army known as invincible in peace, invisible in war.
- I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.
- I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.
- I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are.
- I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace.
- I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy.
- If nominated, I will not run if elected, I will not serve.
- If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking.
- In our Country... one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.
- It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
- My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.
- My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.
- The scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.
- There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.
- There's many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory but it is all hell.
- This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.
- War is at its best barbarism.
- War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
- War is hell.
- War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.
- War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.
- You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will.
- Although I'm a business major out of McGill University, I know nothing... but then I found out much later in life, nobody knows anything.
- But if you want to know the truth, the weirdest thing that has happened has been my discovery that people who attend the conventions are filled with love.
- Death is an absolute marvel.
- Divorce is probably as painful as death.
- Every piece of entertainment is made with the idea that 'This is going to be terrific' and 'This is the best thing I've ever done' and then it hits the public and then the public tells you whether it's good or bad.
- How do I stay so healthy and boyishly handsome? It's simple. I drink the blood of young runaways.
- I don't know how I got to this point but it must be as a result of everything that has come before so if I were to change something, I might not be at this point now.
- I love technology.
- I love the concept of togetherness and the entwinement of marriage.
- I think of doing a series as very hard work. But then I've talked to coal miners, and that's really hard work.
- If saving money is wrong, I don't want to be right!
- Marriage is a reflection of your life in general: how you treat people, how you argue, how secure you are in your own thoughts. How vehemently do you argue your point of view? With what disdain do you view the other's point of view?
- My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.
- Nature is perfect.
- No, I don't regret anything at this point. That may change on the next phone call, but at the moment I don't regret anything.
- Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.
- Success should always be just beyond your grasp.
- The mysteriousness and mystique of space is such, that science fiction attempts to tantalize you by telling you a story that could possibly be out there and that's the appeal of science fiction.
- The possibilities that are suggested in quantum physics tell us that everything that we're looking at may not be in fact there, so the underlying nature of being is weird.
- There's a joy and a pain about directing where the dreams you have are becoming concrete but the attention to detail, the need for time is such that it's overwhelming at times, and the stream of responsibility.
- We live in grief for having left the womb, for having left the teat, then school, then home. In my case, it was leaving marriages, and the death of my wife.
- Well-written words are music.
- When I did the film Generations, in which the character died, I felt like a guest for the first time. That made me very sad.
- Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.
- You and I and everybody in show business and the entertainment industry fly by the seat of our pants. We don't know quite what is going to happen.
- You need to be silly to be funny.
- A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.
- A reform is a correction of abuses a revolution is a transfer of power.
- Anger ventilated often hurries towards forgiveness anger concealed often hardens into revenge.
- Art and science have their meeting point in method.
- Dream manfully and nobly, and thy dreams shall be prophets.
- Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
- Happiness and virtue rest upon each other the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.
- If thou be industrious to procure wealth, be generous in the disposal of it. Man never is so happy as when he giveth happiness unto another.
- If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
- In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
- In science, read, by preference, the newest works in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.
- It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.
- Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem.
- No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.
- One of the sublimest things in the world is plain truth.
- One of the surest evidences of friendship that one individual can display to another is telling him gently of a fault. If any other can excel it, it is listening to such a disclosure with gratitude, and amending the error.
- Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength.
- The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
- There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.
- Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light every eye, looking on, finds its own.
- We tell our triumphs to the crowds, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows.
- What ever our wandering our happiness will always be found within a narrow compass, and in the middle of the objects more immediately within our reach.
- What is past is past, there is a future left to all men, who have the virtue to repent and the energy to atone.
- And where I excel is ridiculous, sickening, work ethic. You know, while the other guy's sleeping? I'm working.
- I don't necessarily believe in organized religion.
- I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.
- I love producing. I am loving doing that. I think that is my most natural space in the business. I just love producing or editing and that's where I thrive.
- I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.
- I try to speak my points of view about black America, and how I feel about black men and the role that black men should play in their lives with their children and in their lives with their women.
- If you're not willing to work hard, let someone else do it. I'd rather be with someone who does a horrible job, but gives 110% than with someone who does a good job and gives 60%.
- I'm a student of world religion, so to me, it's hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing.
- Life is lived on the edge.
- Love is the ultimate theme, but it's not just for women.
- Money and success don't change people they merely amplify what is already there.
- My skin is hard when it comes to my music. But with my movies, I'm still a virgin in a lot of ways. I'm not used to being shot down for no reason.
- So if you stay ready, you ain't gotta get ready, and that is how I run my life.
- The first time that I performed as an actor was the first day on the set of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.'
- The things that have been most valuable to me I did not learn in school.
- Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.
- Tommy Lee Jones is hilarious. I would say, if you look at the body of his work, the character he is most like is the one in 'The Fugitive.' That's how he talks and jokes. That is the type of energy he has.
- Too many people spend money they haven't earned to buy things they don't want to impress people they don't like.
- We all want to be in love and find that person who is going to love us no matter how our feet smell, no matter how angry we get one day, no matter the things we say that we don't mean.
- When you create art, the world has to wait.
- A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all.
- A kind heart is a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity freshen into smiles.
- A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
- A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.
- Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.
- After all, it is the divinity within that makes the divinity without and I have been more fascinated by a woman of talent and intelligence, though deficient in personal charms, than I have been by the most regular beauty.
- Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.
- An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
- Christmas is a season for kindling the fire for hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.
- He is the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
- Honest good humor is the oil and wine of a merry meeting, and there is no jovial companionship equal to that where the jokes are rather small and laughter abundant.
- Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks, shall win my love.
- Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune but great minds rise above them.
- Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
- Marriage is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
- One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more.
- Sweet is the memory of distant friends! Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.
- Temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
- The natural effect of sorrow over the dead is to refine and elevate the mind.
- The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
- There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
- There is certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in traveling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one's position, and be bruised in a new place.
- There is never jealousy where there is not strong regard.
- Those men are most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home.
- Who ever hears of fat men heading a riot, or herding together in turbulent mobs? No - no, your lean, hungry men who are continually worrying society, and setting the whole community by the ears.
- Young lawyers attend the courts, not because they have business there, but because they have no business.
- At my age flowers scare me.
- Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
- Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up.
- Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
- Happiness? A good cigar, a good meal, a good cigar and a good woman - or a bad woman it depends on how much happiness you can handle.
- I can't afford to die I'd lose too much money.
- I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.
- I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.
- I smoke ten to fifteen cigars a day. At my age I have to hold on to something.
- I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.
- I would go out with women my age, but there are no women my age.
- I'd rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.
- If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
- I'm at the age now where just putting my cigar in its holder is a thrill.
- I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere.
- Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.
- Nice to be here? At my age it's nice to be anywhere.
- Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.
- Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
- When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.
- You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.
- Doubt is the middle position between knowledge and ignorance. It encompasses cynicism but also genuine questioning.
- Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.
- Faith is important to me.
- Honestly, I think a good film is spiritual, regardless of whether its subject is faith.
- I can't get my knickers in a twist about my age and ageing in an industry that caters to the ids of 14-year-olds.
- I come from a massive family, and the youngest is twentysomething years younger than I am, so I grew up with children.
- I don't have a caustic sense of humor. What I find funny, that humor comes from a much gentler place.
- I grew up in a Ukrainian Catholic-turned-Christian household, and that is my family's faith.
- I have tender, romantic associations with upstate New York.
- I just hate one-dimensional portrayals of religion it's too cheap and easy to do, and ignores the nuances that go into having a belief system.
- I think God gave us senses of humor, and we should use them.
- I think that films about faith made for faith-based communities have a certain tactic.
- I, for one, am tired of seeing movies about men damaging each other.
- It's a very different thing, religion and faith. Religion is man-made, it's man-regulated. And faith, you can define God as you wish. But I think they're two different things.
- I've played a lot of mothers in my movies.
- Music is what our feelings sound like.
- Someone once told me that religion is like a knife: You can stab someone with it, or you can slice bread with it.
- The Ukrainian community is tight-knit by nature.
- There are women who make things better, there are women who change things, there are women who make things happen, who make a difference. I want to be one of those women.
- There really are three types of 'religious' movies: the ones that make fun of it, the ones that vilify it and the ones that literally preach to the converted.
- There's no wrong way to experience a film.
- Whether we call it religion or faith, we all battle for a balanced integrated soul.
- You earn very little money on independent films and I'm the provider for my home, so I do have to think of taking one for the accountant time and again and that means studio pictures.
- At a formal dinner party, the person nearest death should always be seated closest to the bathroom.
- By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
- Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
- Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
- Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.
- Electricity is really just organized lightning.
- Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
- I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work.
- If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
- I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.
- In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first.
- Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.
- Religion is just mind control.
- Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that.
- The main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live.
- The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
- The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
- There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
- Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
- Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
- What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?
- When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I'm sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.
- When you step on the brakes your life is in your foot's hands.
- You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.
- A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
- A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
- Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.
- Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
- Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
- Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
- It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
- It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.
- Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
- Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.
- Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
- Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.
- No country can act wisely simultaneously in every part of the globe at every moment of time.
- No foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.
- People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any form that would require me to stop talking for three hours.
- Power is the great aphrodisiac.
- The statesman's duty is to bridge the gap between his nation's experience and his vision.
- The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.
- The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
- There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
- University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
- We cannot always assure the future of our friends we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
- You can't make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can't make peace without Syria.
- All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.
- All war is based on deception.
- All war is deception.
- Can you imagine what I would do if I could do all I can?
- He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.
- 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.
- If we know that our own men are in a condition to attack, but are unaware that the enemy is not open to attack, we have gone only halfway towards victory.
- If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.
- 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.
- It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.
- Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.
- Prohibit the taking of omens, and do away with superstitious doubts. Then, until death itself comes, no calamity need be feared.
- Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.
- Secret operations are essential in war upon them the army relies to make its every move.
- The enlightened ruler is heedful, and the good general full of caution.
- The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.
- The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.
- The skilful employer of men will employ the wise man, the brave man, the covetous man, and the stupid man.
- The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
- There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.
- There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.
- Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
- Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy.
- Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.