Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress.

The worst mistake is to have the best ladder and the wrong wall.

Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war.

Somebody's screwed up, and it should be evident to everybody that somebody screwed up…. We should change course. The current course is taking us over Niagara Falls.

When you have made an error of historic proportions, the sooner you change policy, the smaller the price you will pay.

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

One should never risk one's whole fortune unless supported by one's entire forces.

President Bush admitted that the United States went to war in Iraq based on bad intelligence. But he says knowing what we know now he would still do it again. So at least we're learning from our mistakes.

He that makes war without many mistakes has not made war very long.

Communists must be ready at all times to stand up for the truth, because truth is in the interests of the people; Communists must be ready at all times to correct their mistakes, because mistakes are against the interests of the people.

Act after having made assessments. The one who first knows the measure of far and near wins - this is the rule of armed struggle.

In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.

We always make the mistake, the fatal mistake in the case of military people, of imagining that each war will be a kind of version of the one that happened previously.

In my experience of large enterprises, I have found it is often a mistake to try to settle everything at once.

To undo a mistake is always harder than not to create one originally but we seldom have the foresight. Therefore we have no choice but to try to correct our past mistakes.

Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.

Consistency can be a trap, especially if it leads to being consistently wrong rather than to stopping, admitting your mistake, and changing course.

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately.

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 is important not to let emotions get in the way of cold, hard, calculated military planning. Emotions may win arguments, but they don't win wars.

He read reports, examined evidence, and poured more reports up the chain than the Pentagon could read. Nothing short of a human sieve. But in the end he was just one small piece on this game board called war. End of story

In war, groping tactics, half-way measures, lose everything.

Because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind set if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts, and that we're not really at war. I think that would be a terrible mistake for us.

We don't realize that we face a frustrating situation in which we win every battle, but we lose the war.