Sun Tzu Quotes

I don't think there's a lot of discipline right now.

If, however, you are indulgent, but unable to make your authority felt; kind-hearted, but unable to enforce your commands; and incapable, moreover, of quelling disorder: then your soldiers must be likened to spoilt children; they are useless for any practical purpose.

It seems that the reins of government are held with too feeble a hand..

When the common soldiers are too strong and their officers too weak, the result is insubordination. When the officers are too strong and the common soldiers too weak, the result is collapse.

Maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous.

Disorganization can scarcely fail to result in efficiency.

These are the six ways of courting defeat - neglect to estimate the enemy's strength; want of authority; defective training; unjustifiable anger; nonobservance of discipline; failure to use picked men.

Like life isn't complicated enough. You should at least be able to follow the signs.

At some point if you had gone into all of our stories in depth that would've just kind of been all over the place.

Vonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be.

The King is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds.

In war, discipline can do more than fury.

If there is disturbance in the camp, the general's authority is weak. If the banners and flags are shifted about, sedition is afoot. If the officers are angry, it means that the men are weary.

If those who are sent to draw water begin by drinking themselves, the army is suffering from thirst.

But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

Not for the first time, he wished he commanded a highly trained bunch of soldiers instead of a ragtag mob of rejects in varying stages of alcoholism.

A prince must not have any objective nor any thought, nor take up any art, other than the art of war and its ordering and discipline; because it is the only art that pertains to him who commands. And it is of such virtue that not only does it maintain those who were born princes, but many times makes men rise to that rank from private station.

It is imperative to master the principles of the art of war and learn to be unmoved in mind even in the heat of the battle.

I went to a record store, they said they specialized in hard-to-find records. Nothing was alphabetized!

Here again you confuse and mix everything up in your usual way.

It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Peter lost one of his shoes among the cabbages, and the other shoe amongst the potatoes.

Nations with nations mix'd confus'dly die, and lost in one promiscuous carnage lie.

Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion. ... Nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command.