H. R. McMaster Quotes

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

History is totally unpredictable.

Wars and revolutions cannot be prescribed and the circle of their influence determined in advance.

There's chaos out there, and chaos means opportunity.

The world does not have tidy endings. The world does not have neat connections. It is not filled with epiphanies that work perfectly at the moment that you need them.

Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war.

It is an endless procession of surprises. The expected rarely occurs and never in the expected manner.

I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain't seen nothing yet.

War is not neat. It's not tidy. It's a mess.

History proceeds in zig zags through crooked paths.

In war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities …. all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects.

It is not new and it is not order.

When you start a military intervention, you do not know what will happen even in the next hour

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

War is uncertain, precisely because it is political and human.

You see the problem of an unstable White House from the outside and worry about it. But from the inside, it is 50 times worse.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason for Aleister Black and Bobby Lashley to collide, because the world teaches us that sometimes there is no reason or rhyme for conflict.

I looked around. As flock leader, everyone was expecting me to make a decision. Jeb's presence here would bring uncertainty, chaos, probably danger. It would perk up my day.

In war more than anywhere else, things do not turn out as we expect.

Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect.

I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.

In war, important events result from trivial causes.

The devil fools with the best laid plans.