George F. Kennan Quotes

The definition of winning has become distorted. If winning the rights to a property brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, what have you won? When faced with the prospect of heavy financial losses, we have consistently walked away and have done so again.

A surgeon will cut off a limb in order to protect the body from disease. And a commander-in-chief should pull out of a war that cannot be won in order to protect a nation.

No one blames a pilot who takes refuge in port when the storm begins to blow. It is not cowardice to duck under a bullet; what is wrong is to defy it only to fall and never rise again.

Masterly retreat is in itself a victory.

If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.

There is no shame in strategic retreat if it lets you remain strong enough to go after the enemy later.

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

He has drawn back, only in order to have enough room for his leap

A rational army would run away.

A masterful retreat is itself a victory.

In the context of your dreams,knowledge will always gives you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute xceptionally

They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works—although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself. What they didn’t see was that it is beautiful, and that some of the greatest beauties are the briefest.

I feel like sometimes we have to be a little less inclusive and tolerant if other people's opinions could lead to the destruction of our species.

Opinion is, as it were, the queen of the world, but force is its tyrant.

Equities will do well over time - you just have to avoid getting excited when other people are getting excited.

It's better to do nothing with your money than something you don't understand.

The sound rule in busi­ness is that you may give money freely when you have a sur­plus, but your name never-nei­ther as en­dorser nor as mem­ber of a cor­po­ra­tion with in­di­vid­ual li­a­bil­ity

In my experience, God rarely makes our fear disappear. Instead, He asks us to be strong and take courage. What is courage? As Ordinary discovered, courage is not the absence of fear; rather, it's choosing to act in spite of the fear. You could say that without fear, you can't have genuine courage.

Now, in economic crises times, the kind of things you're looking at is it's generally harder to get capital, revenue growth may be more, revenue lines may be unstable or growth may be less easy to predict that you're going to get to. And so what you do is you take a certain conservative approach of when, as all entrepreneurs should do, you plan for both good luck and bad luck, you put extra time on, "Okay, if I have bad luck, what do I do about that?"

No one has any idea what's going to happen. Not even Elon Musk. That's why he's building those rockets. He wants a 'Plan B' on another world.

Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

If you have made a mistake cut your losses as quickly as possible.

Let us resist the opinion of the world fearlessly, provided only that our self-respect grows in proportion to our indifference.

New York is safer than it has been - and it's getting safer. But it's never safe. As the financial and communications capital of the world, this is where terrorists want to make a statement, where they get the most bang for the buck.