Quotes About Strategy

Time is the greatest weapon you have. Patiently keep in mind a long-term goal and neither person nor army can resist you. And charm is the best way of playing for time, of widening your options in any situation. Through charm you can seduce your enemy into backing off, giving you the psychological space to plot an effective counterstrategy.

Coquetry depends on developing a pattern to keep the other person off balance. The strategy is extremely effective. Experiencing a pleasure once, we yearn to repeat it; so the Coquette gives us pleasure, then withdraws it.

That is the power of formlessness — it gives the aggressor nothing to react against, nothing to hit.

Strategy] is more than a science: it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of thought capable of modifying the original guiding idea in the light of ever-changing situations; it is the art of acting under the pressure of the most difficult conditions.

Leaders have always found it useful to have an enemy at their gates in times of trouble, distracting the public from their difficulties. In using your enemies to rally your troops, polarize them as far as possible: they will fight the more fiercely when they feel a little hatred. So exaggerate the differences between you and the enemy—draw the lines clearly.

Without enemies you will not know how or where to maneuver, and you will lose a sense of your limits, of how far you can go.

Toad's ancestral home, won back by matchless valour, consummate strategy, and a proper handling of sticks.

You cannot build a complete memory with a single memory tool any more than you can build a complete building with a single carpentry tool.

The secret of politics is to care about success, but not too much.

War and the threat of war stimulate speculation upon the conditions of peace.

When you're attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.

There are four common ways of making decisions: command, consult, vote, and consensus.

I wasn't destined for greatness; I knew this. But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

I may be a pawn, but I've been to the other side and survived the trip back and I can move like a queen. Don't piss me off.

You want to play the winner?" I called out to Ivy, lounging on a chair with her back to the wall as she pretended to read a magazine and watch us without being obvious about it. She'd put herself right in the sun, which told me she'd had a rough morning. She sat in the sun only when she was frustrated.

You can't stop me. It's the only option we have to get those Weres off Rachel's tail, so unless you have a suggestion, I suggest you shut up.

In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.

They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said. What do you mean? Games don't mean anything. Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me. John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.

Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured.

It was Trotsky who said the party is always trying to keep up with the masses. Strategy comes from below and tactics from above, not the reverse...

Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

It's stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren't like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They'll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they'll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up.

As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one's best to secure one's own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.