Donald Trump Quotes

I have a very firm limitation in mind, but I don’t think the Joint Chiefs do. I know they don’t.

We don’t need corporate generals. We need warrior generals…. Many of our military leaders are like car designers who have never driven a car….they go along to get along.

We get our military people to come back and make recommendations to me and I will follow those recommendations. I will follow them very strongly.

A commander in chief with military experience might be able to prod a conservative military into thinking more imaginatively.

Generals do not always run wars the way they would like to, nor the troops under them.

Military decisions are much more difficult and more often wrong than civilian decisions.

I actually understand what a Marine on the ground goes through. I've seen generals and admirals struggle with different situations.

I will be as careful as I can in making the most significant decisions any president and commander-in-chief can make about sending our men and women into harm's way.

Strategy was first used in Athens (508 BC) to describe the art of leadership used by the ten generals on the war council. Some argue for the more creative, human side, while others argue for the more analytic side of strategy.

It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones, and the saying is true if taken to mean no more than that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones at variance and cross-purposes with each other.

Napoleon wanted his generals to be lucky. I don't think he would have worked with me.

I have the utmost confidence in General Mattis, General Flynn, General Kelly, Dan Coates. I couldn't have picked a better team. And so I'm confident that Donald Trump will listen to them and be guided by them.

I wanted people who wouldn't become too worried about casualties. One always should be concerned about casualties, but the risk of incurring casualties can't be allowed to affect decisions, unless it's evident casualties will be prohibitively heavy. There may be no safe way to write this.

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.

Yet the people, and even the clergy, incapable of forming any rational judgment of the business of peace and war, presumed to arraign the policy of Stilicho, who so often vanquished, so often surrounded, and so often dismissed the implacable enemy of the republic. The first moment of the public safety is devoted to gratitude and joy; but the second is diligently occupied by envy and calumny.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

Sometimes we want to engage in a war for financial reasons, for strategic reasons, for moral reasons, for all sorts of reasons, and it's important when we're making that decision to remind ourselves of what happens to the people on the front lines when we start this process.

while the executive should give every possible value to the information of the specialist, no executive should abdicate thinking on any subject because of the expert. The expert's information or opinion should not be allowed automatically to become a decision. On the other hand, full recognition should be given to the part the expert plays in decision making.

After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws.

Being in charge sometimes means making people mad. Some days you have to overrule even the best advice, because you think it is not right.

Decisions, particularly important ones, have always made me sleepy, perhaps because I know that I will have to make them by instinct, and thinking things out is only what other people tell me I should do.

The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, "Senator, we ought to change the policy," then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.

One bad general is worth two good ones.

Politicians often like to suggest that their policies come about through objective thinking, but if you look at British fascists, for example, what you see - what I see - is a group of people coming to the decisions they came to because something happened to them when they were nine-years-old, or because of some deep prejudice that formed in them subsequent to that.