Quotes About Strategy

Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party precisely because he is a scoundrel. V. I. Lenin

Behind all political success is attention to detail." LARRY O'BRIEN, adviser to John F. Kennedy

In politics a capable ruler must be guided by circumstances, conjectures and conjunctions.

I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.

That's how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl—they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.

They knew all about the war with France from Papa's magazines. But whenever they tried to imagine what a war was actually like, it unfolded in their heads like a cross between a chess game, a horse race, a country dance, and a very racy night at the theater.

Don't go to the hardware store for bread.

Delenda Carthago est.

Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.

The wiles of a veteran turned the younger man's own gift of speed against him.

Avner had lived too long and become too canny to claim the crown of Israel for himself.

You have to know that bigots are unwittingly handing you an edge. By thinking you're lesser than they are, they underestimate you. Lean on that. Learn to use it, and you'll get the upper hand.

Intelligent decision making entails knowing what tool to use for what problem.

I can't let important policy decisions hinge on the fact that an election is coming up every 90 days.

Opinion is death. Opinion is plague. When it comes to web site management, trusting your gut is the last thing you should do.

When you fool a fool, you strike a blow for intelligence.

Cheating is a sin, but honest cunning is simply prudence. It is a virtue. To be sure, it has a likeness to roguery, but that cannot be helped. He who has not learned to practice it is a fool.

George Orwell famously described international sport as 'war minus the shooting'. But for all Orwell's greatness as a thinker, this was one of his least felicitous lines, analogous to 'murder minus the death' or 'life minus the breathing'.

As an ersatz opening batsman, Tavaré did not so much score runs as smuggle them out by stealth.

strategy can never be divorced from the costs of implementing it.

In short, a successful military policy is possible when, and only when, it is one of at least three strands of the policies of the allied countries. The other two are the political and the economic.

The winning investor's objective should be to have one or two big winners rather than dozens of very small profits" (How to Make Money in Stocks, 4th ed. [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009], 274).

If you only want to make average market returns, then scale your positions to a very small size, and your portfolio will act very much like a market index.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.