James Mattis Quotes
- All Quotes
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You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.
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There are many people who do not know if the U.S. Army has 60,000 men or 6 million. They do not have a clue about that.
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Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.
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Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.
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I consider ISIS nothing more than an excuse for Iran to continue its mischief.
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To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase... Rather, it's displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.
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I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.
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The U.S. military is not war weary. Our military draws strength from confronting our enemies when clear policy objectives are set and we are fully resourced for the fight.
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There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops' hearts, not just their heads.
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No war is over until the enemy says it's over.
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Be the hunter, not the hunted.
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Treachery has existed as long as there's been warfare, and there's always been a few people that you couldn't trust.
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Now from a distance, I look back on what the Corps taught me: to think like men of action, and to act like men of thought!
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I don't think the U.S. military is conservative. It's pragmatic.
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If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
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Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed... It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
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There is no God-given right to victory on the battlefield. You win that through the skill and the devotion, the valor and the ferocity of your troops.
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I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.
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Marines don't know how to spell the word 'defeat'.
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In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are: if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.
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There's no way that that our military power will not erode if a robust American economic revival is not part of the cards.
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PowerPoint makes us stupid.
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For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.
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Iran is not a nation-state; it's a revolutionary cause devoted to mayhem.