Quotes About Strategy

The sex that invests most in rearing the young—by carrying a fetus for nine months in its belly, for example—is the sex that makes the least profit from an extra mating. The sex that invests the least has time to spare to seek other mates. Therefore, broadly speaking, males invest less and seek quantity of mates, while females invest more and seek quality of mates.

Imagine how the last presidential campaign would have turned out if instead of the marketing circus that we were treated to, we were just given a weekly round table discussion between Bush, Gore, and Nader for a couple months running up to the election. No staged rallies, no TV images with flags flowing in the sunset, no pollsters. No marketing. Bush would have been luck to get two percent. (from an interview in Attitude, 2002)

Longfellow smiled. A great part of the happiness of life consists not in fighting battles, my dear Lowell, but in avoiding them. A masterly retreat is in itself a victory.

There's an Oriental saying I like: "If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.

You'd be surprised, you can do a lot more damage with your brains than with your fists.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

We Deveauxs preferred to talk you to death, rather than face you in physical combat.

What serves on either side, and if you wish to hide, may protect you from your foe, or show him where to go?

Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line.

He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.

Both the capabilities and evolutionary strategies of men and women, capabilities and strategies that were of course interconnected and mutually reinforcing, made men much more predisposed to fighting than women.

Better to be strong,' he [Lolo] said...'if you can't be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who's strong. But always better to be strong yourself.

If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.

The most important thing you need to do [in this job] is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you're doing is thinking.

What I would say to my successor is that it is important not just to shoot but to aim

I had given her a reassuring smile and patted her hand and told her not to worry, I wouldn't do anything stupid. It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.

In the hands of the shrewd and the ruthless, chaos had proven a gift.

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless;

It took a while to figure out that my problem wasn't a lack of a ten-point plan. Rather, it was my general inability to boil issues down to their essence, to tell a story that helped explain an increasingly uncertain world to the American people and make them feel that I, as president, could help them navigate it.

hide your strength and bide your time.

In other words, FDR understood that to be effective, governance couldn't be so antiseptic that it set aside the basic stuff of politics: You had to sell your program, reward supporters, punch back against opponents, and amplify the facts that helped your cause while fudging the details that didn't.

Cooperate with the Obama administration at your own peril. And if you have to shake his hand, make sure you don't look happy about it.

justifying the past mattered less than planning what to do next.

As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless; I found myself in a series of affectionate but chaste friendships.