Mao Zedong Quotes

When the Americans advance, we harass and retreat, fire from new positions and then retreat again. If the attacking force is too big, we call for support.

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

Military men predominated and gave no thought to the larger situation. They knew how to advance but not how to retreat.

General," said the commander of the delinquent brigade, "I am persuaded that any further display of valor by my troops will bring them into collision with the enemy.

In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory.

A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.

Fight them everywhere. Don't give them a chance to breathe until they withdraw and retreat.

Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.

From a position of this sort, if the enemy is unprepared, you may sally forth and defeat him. But if the enemy is prepared for your coming, and you fail to defeat him, then, return being impossible, disaster will ensue.

In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.

When guerillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances, harass him when he stops, strike him when he is weary, pursue him when he withdraws.

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.

We don't kill Iraqis - our hands do not kill Iraqis. But we target only the occupier with all the means of resistance.

In each succeeding war there is a tendency to proclaim as something new the principles under which it is conducted. Not only those who have never studied or experienced the realities of war, but also professional soldiers frequently fall into the error. But the principles of warfare as I learned them at West Point remain unchanged.

Infantry must move forward to close with the enemy. It must shoot in order to move.... To halt under fire is folly. To halt under fire and not fire back is suicide. Officers must set the example

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

If we read history with an open mind, we cannot fail to conclude that, among all the military virtues, the energetic conduct of war has always contributed most to glory and success.

Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.

According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptableso that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch--an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still "like us.

You can bring your enemies to their knees with the possible exception of the North Vietnamese.

It is the rule in war, if ten times the enemy's strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, be able to divide them; if equal, engage them; if fewer, defend against them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.

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.

I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.

Our poetry emulates the recent progress in military strategy: Our army's strength is the foot soldiers.