Ian Fleming Quotes

If the enemy has occupied them before you, do not follow him, but retreat and try to entice him away.

When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue.

I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.

The experienced fighting pilot does not take unnecessary risks. His business is to shoot down enemy planes, not to get shot down.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

The enemy would not have been in danger if Mr. Stanton had been in the field.

Only it’s just the same. In fact, do you know, because of all that pressure, and worry, and fear, it’s worse. There aren’t many men who think clearest when the stakes are highest. So people are even stupider in a war than the rest of the time. Thinking about how they’ll dodge the blame, or grab the glory, or save their skins, rather than about what will actually work There’s no job that forgives stupidity more than soldiering. No job that encourages it more.

War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy must not be fended off; but smitten down. You may then spare him every exaction, relinquish every gain, but „til then he must be struck incessantly and remorselessly.

There is but one means to extenuate the effects of enemy fire: it is to develop a more violent fire oneself.

The first law of war is to preserve ourselves and destroy the enemy.

The hardest part is when you're in danger yourself. You have to face what could happen and might be likely to happen to you. It's not just that you're there standing next to somebody that something bad is likely to happen to. That is a true moment of reckoning with who you really are.

Attack the enemy's strategy.

A commander in chief ought to say to himself several times a day: If the enemy should appear on my front, on my right, on my left, what would I do? And if the question finds him uncertain, he is not well placed, he is not as he should be, and he should remedy it.

If you take a shot at someone, you keep firing until they can no longer return fire. Wound them, and you have an angry enemy who knows your position.

The task [in Afghanistan] is to reduce civilian casualties while still not hesitating to respond to enemies who are trying to kill our soldiers.

The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don't you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live.

The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy, not permitting the greater portion of our armed forces and our valuable material to be immobilized within the continental United States.

We are going to have to continue to keep the pressure on the enemy. There is no room for complacency on this.

If you don't understand weapons you don't understand fighting. If you don't understand fighting you don't understand war. If you don't understand war you don't understand history. And if you don't understand history you might as well live with your head in a sack.

The military weapon is but one of the means that serve the purposes of war: one out of the assortment which grand strategy can employ.

Sooner or later the world will have to return to the good old days when we fought wars and killed people the old-fashioned way, one at a time.

An enemy, Ender Wiggin," whispered the old man. "I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on I am your teacher.

With great care we might have a dog's chance, but no more.

It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive.