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March 8, 2017 - March 8, 2020
Look at things as they are, not as your emotions color them.
Without war human beings stagnate in comfort and affluence and lose the capacity for great thoughts and feelings, they become cynical and subside into barbarism.
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
we succeed, it is at the point of the sword, and that we die with the weapon in our hand.
If you feel lost and confused, if you lose your sense of direction, if you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe, you have only yourself to blame.
Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else.
Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared.
Don’t depend on the enemy not coming; depend rather on being ready for him.
say or do something that can be read in more than one way, that may be superficially polite but that could also indicate a slight coolness on your part or be seen as a subtle insult. A friend may wonder but will let it pass.
Often the best way to get people to reveal themselves is to provoke tension and argument.
A sharply worded question, an opinion designed to offend, will make them react and take sides.
Instead of internalizing a bad situation, externalize it and face your enemy. It is the only way out.
Those children who seek to avoid conflict at all cost, or those who have overprotective parents, end up handicapped socially and mentally.
Enemies also give you a standard by which to judge yourself, both personally and socially.
victory is your goal, not fairness and balance. Use the rhetoric of war to heighten the stakes and stimulate the spirit.
Once he had made that line clear enough, though, he backed off, which made him look like a conciliator, a man of peace who occasionally went to war. Even if that impression was false, it was the height of wisdom to create it.
What limits individuals as well as nations is the inability to confront reality, to see things for what they are.
Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.
A disease here is an obsessed mind that dwells on one thing. Because all these diseases are in your mind, you must get rid of them to put your mind in order.
Thus one’s victories in battle cannot be repeated—they take their form in response to inexhaustibly changing circumstances.
Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.
education tends to burn precepts into the mind that are hard to shake.
Our greatest weakness is losing heart, doubting ourselves, becoming unnecessarily cautious.
Save your carefulness for the hours of preparation, but once the fighting begins, empty your mind of doubts.
What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.
The first quality of a General-in-Chief is to have a cool head which receives exact impressions of things, which never gets heated, which never allows itself to be dazzled, or intoxicated, by good or bad news. The successive simultaneous sensations which he receives in the course of a day must be classified, and must occupy the correct places they merit to fill, because common sense and reason are the results of the comparison of a number of sensations each equally well considered. There are certain men who, on account of their moral and physical constitution, paint mental pictures out of
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Understand: we tend to overestimate other people’s abilities—after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing—and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.
Understand: you cannot be everywhere or fight everyone. Your time and energy are limited, and you must learn how to preserve them.
self-control—the gift of keeping calm even under the greatest stress—is rooted in temperament.
Stalin fed off fear. If, without being aggressive or brazen, you showed no fear, he would generally leave you alone.
The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you’re facing is a mere mortal, no different from you—which is in fact the truth.
Hara [centre, belly] is only in slight measure innate. It is above all the result of persistent self-training and discipline, in fact the fruit of responsible, individual development.
Authority: A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, bring struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
There is something in war that drives so deeply into you that death ceases to be the enemy, merely another participant in a game you don’t wish to end.
timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts.
Because you think you have options, you never involve yourself deeply enough in one thing to do it thoroughly, and you never quite get what you want.
Sometimes you have to become a little desperate to get anywhere.
As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace.
Feeling death at your heels will make all your actions more certain, more forceful.
The trick is to use this effect deliberately from time to time, to practice it on yourself as a kind of wake-up call.
Often, the harder you tug at people, the less control you have over them. Leadership is more than just barking out orders; it takes subtlety.
A critical step in creating an efficient chain of command is assembling a skilled team that shares your goals and values.
You may not have as much time to spare, but never choose a man merely by his glittering résumé. Look beyond his skills to his psychological makeup.
the end, fluidity will bring you far more power and control than petty domination.
the way to get soldiers to work together and maintain morale is to make them feel part of a group that is fighting for a worthy cause. That distracts them from their own interests and satisfies their human need to feel part of something bigger than they are.
The leader who tries to change the group’s spirit directly—yelling, demanding, disciplining—actually plays into the teenage dynamic and reinforces the desire to rebel.
Understand: a group has a collective personality that hardens over time, and sometimes that personality is dysfunctional or adolescent.
If you wish to be loved by your soldiers, husband their blood and do not lead them to slaughter.
once people know what pleases you and what angers you, they turn into trained poodles, working to charm you with apparent good behavior. Keep them in suspense: make them think of you constantly and want to please you but never know just how to do it. Once they are in the trap, you will have a magnetic pull over them. Motivation will become automatic.
