James Mattis Quotes

I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me I'll kill you all.

General James Mattis said, ‘Be polite and professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

You've been told that you're broken, that you're damaged goods and should be labeled victims. I don't buy it. The truth, instead, is that you are the only folks with the skills, determination, and values to ensure American dominance in this chaotic world.

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 (successfully or unsuccessfully) before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through. I cant tell you the number of times I went down at what was going down on the ground or I was engaged in a fight somewhere and I knew in a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy, and I knew it because I have done so much reading, I knew what I was going to do because I had seen other similar situation in the reading, I knew how they'd been dealt with successfully or unsuccessfully.

If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you’re functionally illiterate.

Many of Trump's former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president MIke Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats, former chief of staff John Kelley; former chief of staf Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them. Sometimes what they reveal is inspiring. For example, James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, resigned over principle, a concept so alien to Mr. Trump that it took days for the president to realize what had happened, before he could start lying about the man.

Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer, a tetradoma-tional gazebocroticon (the “Mamma Lujah” known to every schoolboy scandaller, be he Matty, Marky, Lukey or John-a-Donk),

There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don’t think you do. It’s just business.

What is the present state of my understanding? For here lies all indeed. As for all other things, they are outside the compass of my own will; and if outside the compass of my will, then they are as dead things to me, and as it were, mere smoke.

Elizabeth and Sunny had always been security conscious, but their level of paranoia had reached a new peak with the launch in Walgreens stores. They had convinced themselves that Quest and LabCorp viewed Theranos as a mortal threat to their cozy oligopoly and that they would try to quash their new competitor by any means available. There was also the matter of the promise John Fuisz had made in his deposition to “fuck with” Elizabeth until she died. She took that threat very seriously. Following his retirement from the military earlier that year, James Mattis had joined the Theranos board

The fears of militarization Holbrooke had expressed in his final, desperate memos, had come to pass on a scale he could have never anticipated. President Trump had concentrated ever more power in the Pentagon, granting it nearly unilateral authority in areas of policy once orchestrated across multiple agencies, including the State Department. In Iraq and Syria, the White House quietly delegated more decisions on troop deployments to the military. In Yemen and Somalia, field commanders were given authority to launch raids without White House approval. In Afghanistan, Trump granted the secretary of defense, General James Mattis, sweeping authority to set troop levels. In public statements, the White House downplayed the move, saying the Pentagon still had to adhere to the broad strokes of policies set by the White House. But in practice, the fate of thousands of troops in a diplomatic tinderbox of a conflict had, for the first time in recent history, been placed solely in military hands. Diplomats were no longer losing the argument on Afghanistan: they weren’t in it. In early 2018, the military began publicly rolling out a new surge: in the following months, up to a thousand new troops would join the fourteen thousand already in place. Back home, the White House itself was crowded with military voices. A few months into the Trump administration, at least ten of twenty-five senior leadership positions on the president’s National Security Council were held by current or retired military officials. As the churn of firings and hirings continued, that number grew to include the White House chief of staff, a position given to former general John Kelly. At the same time, the White House ended the practice of “detailing” State Department officers to the National Security Council. There would now be fewer diplomatic voices in the policy process, by design.

James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014, and named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis. Those that say, “Oh this is well worked out,” they know nothing—nothing—about chemical synthesis—nothing. … From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That’s how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.23

military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.

Former secretary of defense James Mattis told colleagues he would often get late-night calls from Trump, in which the president fulminated about an issue, often threatening to carry out wildly irresponsible actions. These included, according to a source close to Mattis, the belief that we should immediately attack North Korea (during the early days of his intemperate Twitter campaign against that country). In each of these instances, the cerebral, seasoned Mattis would adopt what became an approach emulated by many in Trump’s cabinet. He would hear out the president’s late-night rant and then, to defuse the issue, promise to think about it and ask to meet the next day to discuss it. Often by then Trump’s “temperature had gone down a few degrees,” said one very senior Trump Pentagon official. “Or at least you could invite other people into the room—the calls late at night were often one on one—and ideally some of them were more rational and would help talk the president off the ledge.

Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward. Many of Trump’s former top cabinet officers and aides have said publicly that Trump should not be president again and should not even be on the ballot. Those include: former vice president Mike Pence; former secretary of defense Mark Esper; former chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley; former national security adviser John Bolton; former secretary of defense James Mattis; former director of national intelligence Dan Coats; former chief of staff John Kelly; former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney; and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Whether that’s media titan Arianna Huffington, who carries a laminated note card of a Marcus Aurelius quote in her purse at all times, or General James Mattis, who has carried Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations with him on military campaigns for decades, Stoicism is alive and well in the modern world—with all the same brilliance, boldness, and humanness. There are writers like Tim Ferriss who have helped popularize Stoicism to millions, and Laura Kennedy, whose thoughtful “Coping” column runs in The Irish Times, and Donald Robertson, who specializes in the treatment of anxiety and the use of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Chrysippus had been an elite

Besides Theranos’s supposed scientific accomplishments, what helped win James and Grossman over was its board of directors. In addition to Shultz and Mattis, it now included former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, former Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn, and former navy admiral Gary Roughead. These were men with sterling, larger-than-life reputations who gave Theranos a stamp of legitimacy. The common denominator between all of them was that, like Shultz, they were fellows at the Hoover Institution. After befriending Shultz, Elizabeth had methodically cultivated each one of them and offered them board seats in exchange for grants of stock.

I come in peace, I did not bring artillery. But I am pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.

In a terse letter of resignation, Secretary of Defense James Mattis—the only member of Trump’s cabinet with a truly independent and bipartisan reputation—wrote, “Our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships.” The storied former U.S. Marine general declared, “We must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours.” And he stated that his “views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues.” He was stepping down, he concluded, because the president has “the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with” his own.

The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot.

There are hunters and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

You stay teachable most by reading books, by reading what other people went through.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have ‘a conservation’ with you.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have ‘a conservation’ with you.

Matty (7): Daddy, my teacher said that light bulb was invented by Edison. Dad: That’s correct. Matty: No, it isn’t. Dad: Excuse me? Matty: Well… didn’t God create everything?

Cato was kind. Cato was tough. He was, in a way, the embodiment of an expression that a stoic in modern times, General James Mattis, would adapt as a motto of the 1st Marine Division: No better friend, no worse enemy.

Goebbels—a particularly vicious anti-Semite who had engineered much of Hitler’s political rise—was now systematically dismantling what remained of a free press in Germany. Just over five feet tall, with a deformed and shortened right leg, a club foot, and an oddly shaped head that seemed too large for his small body, Goebbels did not look the part of a power broker, but he in fact was among the most important and influential members of Hitler’s inner circle. He was intelligent, articulate, and remarkably cunning. Many who knew him in social settings—among them, the American ambassador to Germany, William Dodd; his wife, Mattie; and his daughter, Martha—found him “delightful,” “infectious,” “one of the few men in Germany with a sense of humor.” He had a surprisingly compelling speaking voice for so small a man,

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.