Quotes from Stanley A. McChrystal

Change is painful, and people are always reticent to accept a lot of pain.

I want the American people to understand, we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

What I really want are students who want to partner with other people, to be part of an organization and to influence people so that they can accomplish things that the organization would not have accomplished otherwise.

If we are visiting Afghans, typically the Afghan governor, district or provincial governor, we see he doesn't wear body armor, and yet we're walking through his streets. I'm his guest. I think that that's important that I send a message that I trust him and I don't think I am more valuable than I think he is.

Over my career, I'd watched senior leader visits have unintended negative consequences. Typically, schedules were unrealistically overloaded and were modified during the visit to cancel parts of the plan.

How we present ourselves matters a lot, and that's every American, not just at the senior levels.

Public, noncommercial broadcasting is also giving kids social-emotional skills like persistence and self-control that are fundamental to success in school, not to mention in the military, the institution where I spent most of my career.

Like leaders in many walks of life, my business has been to serve with, and for, others.

America needs a big idea that plays to its strength. It should look to national service.

My very identity as a soldier came to an abrupt end. I'd been soldiering as long as I'd been shaving. Suddenly I'd been told I could no longer soldier, and it felt as though no one really cared if I ever shaved again.

In every relationship, there are two perspectives to it.

Wars often begin with enthusiastic vigor but typically settle into costly, dirty business characterized for soldiers by fear, frustration, and loneliness.

You're going to find out who your friends are. Anything that happens in your life is one of those challenges. It may not be at the level of celebrity, but everybody's going to travel that road.

I think life is hard at the combat outposts, and anything that distracts us from supporting them, in my mind, is something that we shouldn't do.

As our leaders in Washington confront tough decisions about our budget priorities, I urge them to continue federal funding for public broadcasting.

We need to defend against weaknesses within and enemies without, using the tools of civil society and hard power. We don't have to pick one over the other.

In combat operations in places like Afghanistan, we often confronted the specter of dangerous people with powerful weapons who were a threat to their community and to our soldiers. Our aim was to quickly determine who in that community was a legitimate actor who could be trusted with a firearm and who was not.

Anyone in a position of power is either corrupt or assumed to be corrupt, and the assumption of corruption is as bad as the reality of it.

Defeat the Taliban. Secure the population.

A fundamental principle that I learned in my career, and a principle that my consulting company McChrystal Group helps American civilian companies to adopt, is that winning units and organizations ensure that the time they actually spend - daily, weekly, and yearly - must hew closely to their priorities.

How Americans restore trust may be an existential question for their country, then, but it's ultimately a practical one: What U.S. society needs to answer it in the coming years aren't lamentations but practical measures, especially among the emerging generations that will define America's future.

Trust is an amazing commodity. The Afghan people often talk to me about having to develop trust in America, because they believe that we deserted them in 1990 and 1991.

Throughout my career, I have lived by the principles of personal honor and professional integrity.

The military likes to figure out how to do something, put it in a manual or an operating procedure, and perfect doing it, and have everyone do it the same way. I don't like that.