“
D'you think he would have thought ahead like that?" said Henry.
"Assuredly," said Will. "The man's a strategist." He tapped his temple. "Like me.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2))
“
Was I not tempting enough?” I asked him. “Not classy enough?”
I didn’t expect him to answer, but he did. And that was almost worse. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”
He’d stood up and slipped his hands into his pockets. I met his gaze and saw the green fire in his eyes. “You’re perfect—beautiful, intelligent, intractable in a kind of . . . attractive way. Headstrong, but a good strategist. An amazing fighter.
”
”
Chloe Neill (Twice Bitten (Chicagoland Vampires, #3))
“
Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory is won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
”
”
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives.
”
”
Carl von Clausewitz (On War)
“
A well-seasoned strategist waits for the right opportunity.
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”
Holly Black (The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1))
“
Battles are won by men. Wars are won by strategists.
”
”
Michael Scott (The Sorceress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, #3))
“
A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“
You’re a clever strategist, but not all battles require tricks. Sometimes the simplest way to kill something is to swim up to it and bite it in half.
”
”
Shaun Hick (The Ghost And Its Shadow)
“
15. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
”
”
Sun Tzu (The Art of War (Illustrated))
“
Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
”
”
Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
This armchair strategist never possessed the qualities for true generalship, because he ignored practical problems.
”
”
Antony Beevor (Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943)
“
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists
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”
Anita Brookner
“
Don't pray for better days, pray for a better attitude to withstand uncertain days
”
”
Mac Duke The Strategist
“
As content strategist Jonathon Colman, who works for Facebook, told me: “Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.
”
”
Ann Handley (Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content)
“
Besides, don’t you know basic geometry, Strategist Sima?” I make a triangle with my fingers and look through it. “A triangle is the strongest shape.
”
”
Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow (Iron Widow, #1))
“
In my experience, the content strategist is a rare breed who's often willing and able to embrace whatever role is necessary to deliver on the promise of useful, useable content.
”
”
Kristina Halvorson (Content Strategy for the Web)
“
It is very easy to be a military strategist, a mercenary, or a king, but much harder to be a father.
”
”
Nadia Scrieva (Tides of Tranquility (Sacred Breath, #5))
“
So she did not replay, but played the strategist. She retained more power by withholding an answer.
”
”
E. Lockhart (The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks)
“
One day, James Williams--the former Google strategist I met--addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.
”
”
Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again)
“
Physically agile, this squishy strategist and tentacled tactician uses its intelligence and agency to intuit situations, anticipate outcomes, invent solutions, and improvise, remaining relevant for nearly 300 million years.
”
”
Roger Spitz (Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World)
“
You're perfect- beautiful, intelligent, intractable in a kind of... attractive way. Headstrong, but a good strategist. An amazing fighter."
"But that's not enough?"
"It's too much. You think I haven't thought about what it might be like to return to my rooms at the end of the night and find you there- to find you in my bed, to have your body and your laugh and your mind? To look across a room and know that you were mine- that *I'd* claimed you. *Me.* Ethan Sullivan. Not the four-hundred-year-old vampire, not the child of Balthasar or the Novitiate of Peter Cadogan. Me. Just me. Just you and me.
”
”
Chloe Neill (Twice Bitten (Chicagoland Vampires, #3))
“
The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
”
”
Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
“
We should also be strategists in our lives and at work, and this is a simple and fun task.
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”
AnaMaria Rivera (Heresy: A guide to Challenge Your Beliefs!™ and create happiness in your life)
“
We were brand strategists and property lawyers and human resources specialists and personal finance consultants. We didn't know how to do anything so we Googled everything.
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”
Ling Ma
“
The demon of war was a strategist on all levels.
”
”
Kerri Maniscalco (Kingdom of the Cursed (Kingdom of the Wicked, #2))
“
If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.
”
”
Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture (McNulty Family))
“
Always think at least two steps ahead [in everything, with everyone].
”
”
A.J. Darkholme (Rise of the Morningstar (The Morningstar Chronicles, #1))
“
Have you met Diana?” Theo said. “Diana, this is my father, Michael Santos. The savior of Keralis Labs. He’s quite the strategist, but not what I would call a lot of fun.” Michael ignored him and offered Diana his hand. “A pleasure. Are you one of Alia’s friends from Bennett? She’s usually with that pudgy little Indian girl.” “I’m not sure who you mean,” said Diana, feeling her anger prickle. “I’ve only met her friend Nim, the brilliant designer.
”
”
Leigh Bardugo (Wonder Woman: Warbringer (DC Icons, #1))
“
He (Antonio Machado) was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.
”
”
Javier Cercas (Soldados de Salamina)
“
A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists.
”
”
W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant)
“
A strategist should think in terms of paralyzing, not of killing. —Basil Liddell Hart
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”
Lawrence Freedman (Strategy: A History)
“
Richard found himself imagining the earl sixty, eighty, five hundred years ago: a mighty warrior, a cunning strategist, a great lover of women, a fine friend, a terrifying foe. There was still the wreckage of that man in there somewhere. That was what made him so terrible, and so sad.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere (London Below, #1))
“
The ability to persuade not only one’s people but also allies and enemies was a vital attribute of the successful strategist. In this way, strategy required a combination of words and deeds, and the ability to manipulate them both.
”
”
Lawrence Freedman (Strategy: A History)
“
If we all work together there is no telling how we can change the world through the impact of promoting positivity online.
”
”
Germany Kent
“
In essence, the job of the strategist is to understand and cope with competition. P. 25
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Michael E. Porter (HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy)
“
In order to be a tech leader, visionary and strategist you can't fear being wrong - it is going to happen sooner or later!
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”
Kevin Coleman (Conservation)
“
Real strategists are warriors and must be willing and able to fight battles, to “see the elephant,” as Civil War soldiers were fond of saying.
”
”
Robert L. O'Connell (Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman)
“
The real heart of strategy is the strategist.
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”
Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
“
The archtraitor and madman Shuos Jedao had appeared as a Ninefox Crowned with Eyes, visionary and strategist, but had proved to be an Immolation Fox.
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”
Yoon Ha Lee (Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1))
“
But who among us is perfect? Even the greatest strategists have their eclipses, and the greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it into the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, 'That is all there was!' But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
“
It's didn't take a genis tactician to see that failure was imminent, Alyss more powerful that Arch had supposed. He would have to focus on his contingency plan and let the Glass Eyes attack on Wonderland fizzle out--a circunstance mildly disapointing, but not worrisome. Such a strategist was the king that he had a contingency plan for his contingency plan, and even, if circunstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.
”
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Frank Beddor
“
Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (On China)
“
Tragedy and comedy involve an audience, so they must give--sharing themselves to elicit tears and laughter. Melodrama is not such a strategist. It meets no one's expectation but its internal need to feel.
”
”
Yiyun Li (Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life)
“
The fanatic emphasis on ‘Plan B’ that professionals talk about is not a coward’s fall-back system. It serves a purpose, a purpose that a strategist has envisioned and planned before the need for an alternate solution surfaces.
”
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Andy Paula
“
Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
Boastfulness and excessive pride are also the weak, self-destructive points that can reveal a person's lack of credibility and deficient integrity. ~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy
”
”
Angelica Hopes
“
If you don't take care of your money your money won't take care of you.
”
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Mac Duke The Strategist
“
A marionette, unscrupulous political strategist of abusive politicians has its unguarded self-destructive backlash. ~ Angelica Hopes, Karmic Harvest Trilogy
”
”
Angelica Hopes
“
He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does.
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”
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2))
“
Succumbing is for a loser or strategist.
”
”
Toba Beta (Master of Stupidity)
“
He’s a rather brilliant defensive tactician,” Grimm said. “I agree,” Bayard said. “The problem is that he’s an inept defensive strategist.
”
”
Jim Butcher (The Aeronaut's Windlass (The Cinder Spires, #1))
“
When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.
”
”
Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
“
The smart strategist allows strategy to be shaped by events. Good reactions can make great strategy. Strategy involves competition of goals, and the risk is the difference between those goals and the ability of the organization to achieve them. So part of the risk is created by the strategy.
”
”
Max McKeown (The Strategy Book)
“
Playing the blame game is stupid and childish. Even if it is someone else’s fault, the blame game is wasted time, effort, and energy that takes you somewhere that is not going to get you anywhere.
”
”
Loren Weisman (The Artist's Guide to Success in the Music Business: The “Who, What, When, Where, Why & How” of the Steps that Musicians & Bands Have to Take to Succeed in Music)
“
Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don’t turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don’t like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a nonprofit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you’re going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.
”
”
David Axelrod (Believer: My Forty Years in Politics)
“
We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don't do so... I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! "This was an energetic fact for the sorcerers of ancient Mexico ... They took us over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance. just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, the predators rear us in human coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them." "No, no, no, no," [Carlos replies] "This is absurd don Juan. What you're saying is something monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men, or for anyone." "Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you? ... You haven't heard all the claims yet. I want to appeal to your analytical mind. Think for a moment, and tell me how you would explain the contradictions between the intelligence of man the engineer and the stupidity of his systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behaviour. Sorcerers believe that the predators have given us our systems of belief, our ideas of good and evil, our social mores. They are the ones who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure. They have given us covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us complacent, routinary, and egomaniacal." "'But how can they do this, don Juan? [Carlos] asked, somehow angered further by what [don Juan] was saying. "'Do they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?" "'No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said, smiling. "They are infinitely more efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and meek and weak, the predators engaged themselves in a stupendous manoeuvre stupendous, of course, from the point of view of a fighting strategist. A horrendous manoeuvre from the point of view of those who suffer it. They gave us their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which becomes our mind. The predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear of being discovered any minute now." "I know that even though you have never suffered hunger... you have food anxiety, which is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any moment now its manoeuvre is going to be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which, after all, is their mind, the predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient for them. And they ensure, in this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their fear." "The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with the idea of when [the predator] made its appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete being at one point, with stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends nowadays. And then, everything seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man. What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple predator. It is very smart, and organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man, the magical being that he is destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat." "There are no more dreams for man but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of meat: trite, conventional, imbecilic.
”
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Carlos Castaneda (The Active Side of Infinity)
“
Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank.
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Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra)
“
As writer and media strategist Ryan Holiday has noted, epiphanies are not life-altering.9 It’s not radical moments of action that give us long-lasting, permeating change—it’s the restructuring of our habits. The idea is what science philosopher Thomas Kuhn dubbed a “paradigm shift.” Kuhn suggested we don’t change our lives in flashes of brilliance, but through a slow process in which assumptions unravel and require new explanations. It’s in these periods of flux that microshifts happen and breakthrough-level change begins to take shape.
”
”
Brianna Wiest (The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery)
“
The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy)
“
Rick Wilson, a national GOP strategist, has called Trump "a virus that has infected the Republican party." He often recites a litany of vengeful acts Trump has engaged in which disqualify him from the position of Commander in Chief.
”
”
Gizmo, The Puzzled Puppy (What Donald Trump Supporters Need to Know: But Are Too Infatuated to Figure Out)
“
Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies of War)
“
Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero.
”
”
Homer (The Odyssey)
“
The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort . . . The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34
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Henry Kissinger (On China)
“
Boastfulness and excessive pride do not equate at all with humility and honesty, credibility and integrity. ~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy
”
”
Angelica Hopes
“
Great ideas come from difficult places
”
”
Mac Duke The Strategist
“
You wound me
I remove his hand and meet him in the eye. "No worse than I already have.
”
”
Joan He (Strike the Zither (Kingdom of Three, #1))
“
The worst sin you can ever commit to yourself is to sit and wait for someone to give you money
”
”
Mac Duke The Strategist
“
a warrior knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it. As a function of his clarity of mind he is a strategist and a tactician. He can evaluate his circumstances accurately and then adapt himself to the “situation on the ground,” as we say.
”
”
Robert L. Moore (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering Masculinity Through the Lens of Archetypal Psychology - A Journey into the Male Psyche and Its Four Essential Aspects)
“
After months of rumors, inference, and horrible miscalculations, the impossible had happened. The U.S. Pacific fleet lay twisted anad burning at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in Honolulu. Had he been wrong about Japan not taking an offensive right now? God, he had thousands of men and women to think of, and he feared in his heart that it might not turn out the way he had seen it. He felt doomed, almost paralyzed by his gross miscalculation. He determined, however, that he would not let the word out about Pearl Harbor until he could meet with his American strategists and Philippine President Manuel Quezon.
”
”
Joyce Shaughnessy (Blessed Are the Merciful)
“
Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.
”
”
Henry Kissinger (On China)
“
But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People actually did sit in strategy meetings discussing ways to get all those surplus calories into people who neither needed nor wished to consume them. Children have been targeted especially; food companies spend over $10 billion a year selling food brands to kids, and it isn't broccoli they're pushing. Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers. We all subsidize the cheap calories with our tax dollars, the strategists make fortunes, and the overweight consumers get blamed for the violation. The perfect crime.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
“
Win or lose, the gods feast on our deeds. A man pets a stray, and his small pleasure in the act of kindness feeds Slaanesh. A woman strikes her crying child and that awful moment of elation she feels feeds Khorne. A Munitorum drone considers suicide. Nurgle grows fat on his despair. A merciful strategist devises a plan for bloodless victory, and Tzeentch is content. The Word Bearers think the gods crave worship. But the gods care for nothing save filling their bellies with our sorrows. Intentionally or not, we are all meat for the beast. Even you.
”
”
Josh Reynolds (Fabius Bile: The Omnibus (Fabius Bile: Warhammer 40,000))
“
Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart.
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”
Henry Kissinger (On China)
“
Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf the past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.
”
”
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited)
“
the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).
”
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder)
“
STEPHEN MILLER The ideological zampolit of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller is brilliant, dangerous, and also needs to spend a week getting laid. My God, does it show. All that pent-up fury at Mexicans and Muslims is a bad look on anyone. One-time college besties with pudgy racist thought leader Richard Spencer, Miller is the thinking man’s racist on Team Trump.
”
”
Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
“
Try holding yourself accountable to yourself. If you had to give yourself a daily, weekly, or monthly report, would you be proud to talk about what you had done, or would you need to be prettying up things, bullshitting, or lying to keep your job?
”
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Loren Weisman (The Artist's Guide to Success in the Music Business: The “Who, What, When, Where, Why & How” of the Steps that Musicians & Bands Have to Take to Succeed in Music)
“
It speaks to the fact that Trump’s notorious base is impervious to reason and immune to irony and is still a deep mystery to many who aren’t Trump supporters. They are willful, petulant, and full of pointless defiance. They’ve become defined by an obsession with Trump as the sole remedy for the offenses imposed on them by a rotating cast of villains and evildoers. In the process, they’ve become easy marks for every flavor of conspiratorial lunacy and gimcrack appeals to their worst instincts.
”
”
Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
“
A Yale professor of military history, Micheal Howard, writing in the New York Times )January 28, 1991) quoted the military strategist Clausewitz approvingly: "The fact that a bloody slaughter is a horrifying act must make us take war more seriously, but not provide an excuse for gradually blunting our swords in the name of humanity.
”
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
“
I wrote many things for and with John. I know this is one assignment he'd rather I didn't have to take on. Although I had a close – head to head, arm to arm working relationship with John, that proximity never affected the fact that from the moment I met him, through all work, I remain his number one fan. He was a brilliant performer, writer, tactician, business strategist and most importantly, he was the only man that I could dance with. He was a great – a world class – emissary of American humor. John was a patriot, a resident of the most wide open, liberal society on earth, and he took full advantage of it. In come cases, real greatness gives license for real indulgence; whether it's as a reward, as therapy or as sanctuary. For as hard as John worked, there had to be an additional illicit thrill to make the effort all worthwhile. John was a nighthawk, true. But he was not an immoral individual. He was a good man, a kind man, a warm man, a hot man. What we are talking about here is a good man – and a bad boy. Johnny – you can be sure that I'll have my antennae out for the paranatural and the spiritual, and believe me, if there's any contact with him, I'll let you know.
”
”
Dan Aykroyd
“
Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems and a more competent military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II might have specialised. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naive fantasist with a penchant for schemes.
”
”
Dan Jones (The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England)
“
Be gifted with an honest, ethically wise, keen observation as you detect a pair of deceptive eyes.
~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy
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”
Angelica Hopes
“
The path destined for the greats to walk is wide but narrow to the close minded.
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”
Mac Duke The Strategist
“
It is not the economy that determines your income, it is your own personal development
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Mac Duke The Strategist
“
No one can create your brand for you. No one can create your story for you. To be authentically created, this has to be with you.
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”
Loren Weisman
“
If there’s a sharper critique of America’s failed education system than the breathless, mindless Trump voter, I can’t name it.
”
”
Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
“
No, not every Trump supporter is a racist, xenophobic, alt-right man-child. However, every racist, xenophobic alt-right man-child is a Trump supporter.
”
”
Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
“
We call you uneducated when you have 50-5000 friends on Facebook and you are still broke
”
”
Mac Duke The Strategist
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industrial-scale ass-kissing, and the worst instincts and beliefs scraped from the darkest corners of our national shame closet.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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Bannon’s confidence he is the smartest guy in the room isn’t misplaced in Trump World, and certainly not in the presence of Trump.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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Military strategists are taught never to start a war without having a plan to end it.
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Craig Whitlock (The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War)
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the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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Did you know you have Enormous Potential... Reach inside and discover it, then release it and Thrive! ~Janiece Rendon Transition Strategist
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Janiece Rendon (Trust the Curves)
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What you believe about “You” becomes your reality, be careful what you believe, especially about yourself. ~Janiece Rendon Transition Strategist
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Janiece Rendon (Trust the Curves)
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In the pantheon of military thinkers and grand strategists, two giants stand out: the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz and the Chinese master Sun Tsu.
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Sebastian Gorka (Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War)
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he could come up with a better idea than anything proposed by all the scientists, the cyberneticians and strategists, with all their computers?
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Stanisław Lem (The Invincible)
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As the Strategist had said, if you want your enemy to fight to the death, cut off all escape; if you want your enemy to retreat, leave a path open.
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Brent Weeks (The Broken Eye (Lightbringer, #3))
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Higher-order strategies designed to maximize elbow room can in this way depend critically on the self-knowledge of the strategist.
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Daniel C. Dennett (Elbow Room, new edition: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting)
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Marketing without understanding the customer is a strategy full of flaws
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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And what good was a political strategist who couldn't look ahead to his own death? Without that he would have been merely another Hitler, who didn't want his country to survive him.
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Philip K. Dick (Now Wait For Last Year)
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That dominance came to an abrupt end with the creation and implementation of what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy. The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.50 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”51 Similarly, John Ehrlichman, special counsel to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way: “We’ll go after the racists.”52 In Ehrlichman’s view, “that subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.”53
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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As it turned out, Clark’s shortcomings as a strategist—particularly failing to accurately take the measure of Milosevic—were as nothing in comparison to his deficiencies as a battlefield general.
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Andrew J. Bacevich (The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War)
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In his seminal paper ‘Destruction and Creation’, the military strategist John R. Boyd created a theory with direct applicability to a fast-changing environment. ‘To maintain an accurate or effective grasp of reality,’ he argued, ‘one must undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with the environment to assess its constant changes.’ He asked himself, ‘how do we create the mental concepts to support decision making activity?’ His answer was the Decision Cycle or OODA Loop. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It is quick to apply, and useful for everyday decision-making.
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James Kerr (Legacy)
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Vladimir Putin pledges no allegiance to to the democratic articles of faith, but he does not explicitly renounce democracy. He disdains Western values while professing to identify with the West. He doesn’t care what the State Department puts in next year’s human rights report, because he has yet to pay a political price in his own country for the sins reported in prior years. He tells bald lies with a straight face, and when guilty of aggression, blames the victim. He has convinced many, apparently including the American president, that he is a master strategist, a man of strength and will. Confined to Russia, these facts would be sobering, but Putin, like Mussolini nine decades ago, is watched carefully in other regions by leaders who are tempted to follow in his footsteps. Some already are.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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We could recite passages from Shakespeare and legends about African kingdoms going back thousands of years. We could share facts about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the largest forced migration of a people in the history of humankind, and about the great military strategist Queen Nzingah, who defended the nation of Angola against Portuguese invaders in a powerful effort to destroy the slave trade entirely.
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Ilyasah Shabazz (X)
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The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” Every positive has its negative. Every negative has its positive.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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History bears witness to the vital part that the ‘prophets’ have played in human progress—which is evidence of the ultimate practical value of expressing unreservedly the truth as one sees it. Yet it also becomes clear that the acceptances and spreading of that vision has always depended on another class of men—“leaders” who had to be philosophical strategists, striking a compromise between truth and men’s receptivity to it.
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Jawaharlal Nehru (The Discovery of India)
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All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. Anger his general and confuse him. Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. Keep him under a strain and wear him down. When he is united, divide him. Attack where he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you.
These are the strategist's keys to victory. It is not possible to discuss them beforehand. now if the estimates made in the temple before hostilities indicate victory it is because calculations show one's strength to be superior to that of his enemy; if they indicate defeat, it is because calculations show that one is inferior. With many calculations, one can win; with few one cannot. How much less chance of victory has one who makes none at all! By this means I examine the situation and the outcome will be clearly apparent.
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
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the brilliant strategist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart came to a stunning conclusion: In only 6 of the 280 campaigns was the decisive victory a result of a direct attack on the enemy’s main army. Only six. That’s 2 percent.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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His message centered on the figure of a generalist known as the comprehensive designer, “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist” capable of grasping whole systems.
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Alec Nevala-Lee (Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller)
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Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair
of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury,
with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he
suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his
fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the
right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an
unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and
her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring"
spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing
City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd
bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when
she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords,
with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own
murdered steaders at her back.
But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the
Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that
moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her
equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of
devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much
a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself
had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she
could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances.
And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last
he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty,
and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong
circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met.
In fact, at this moment, she was .
It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or
even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply
personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space
itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy
shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those
agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew
now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a
determination which would not— couldnot—relent or rest.
"I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget,
and one day— oneday, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we
do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them.
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David Weber (Mission of Honor (Honor Harrington, #12))
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The strategist should take up specific situations only after the requirement for provision of the spectrum of concepts has been met, and then only for one of two reasons. The first is for the derivation of logistic and material needs.
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J.C. Wylie (Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (Classics of Sea Power))
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You have inside you an amazing power that will help you leave the past behind and guide your tomorrow for an amazing adventure. Never under estimate your internal power, your internal power of God. ~Janiece Rendon Transition Strategist
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Janiece Rendon (Trust the Curves)
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Although ‘Machiavellian’ has become synonymous with strategies based on deceit and manipulation, Machiavelli’s approach was actually far more balanced. He understood that the more the prince was perceived to rely on devious methods, the less likely it would be that they succeeded. The wise strategist would seek to develop a foundation for the exercise of power that went beyond false impressions and harsh punishments, and onto real accomplishments and general respect.
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Lawrence Freedman (Strategy: A History)
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Looks, intimidation, specialisation, special titles, awards, and any superlative status quo can never hide the deficient character of a toxic leech of calumny, and/or one's excessive sense of entitlement.
Genuine diplomacy, true deep honesty, sincerity, and mutual respect are absent in an arrogant, offensive, defensive, deceptive, destructive, distractive, intimidating, abusive, defamatory, sicko, toxic, and sadistic, manipulative, unscrupulous, strategical, power player, fame whore.
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Angelica Hopes
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The man God uses does not pattern his life after well-known military strategists, political figures, heroes ofthis world, or other prominent Christians. Rather, he makes an absolute commitment to pattern his life after Jesus Christ as the Master Servant.
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Henry T. Blackaby (The Man God Uses)
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to Sarah Longwell, a GOP strategist critical of Trump, ordinary voters who continue to be election deniers “aren’t bad or unintelligent people. The problem is that the Big Lie is embedded in their daily life. They hear from Trump-aligned politicians, their like-minded peers, and MAGA-friendly media outlets—and from these sources they hear the same false claims repeated ad infinitum.”537 The public’s willingness to embrace, repeat, and amplify disinformation portends a frightening future for democracy in America.
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Barbara McQuade (Attack from Within: How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America)
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The BDS on campus operation is organized by, among others, a group in Chicago, Illinois, called American Muslims for Palestine, or AMP. For years, AMP, through its sponsorship of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), has been sending strategists, digital and communications experts, graphic designers, video editors, and legal advisors to colleges all over America and running flashy events in expensive hotels for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel, minimizing pro-Israel voices on campus, and harassing Jewish and pro-Israel students in order to deter them from supporting Israel. The embodiment of Cancel Culture. Managing such a sophisticated network of political operatives, extensive marketing, and (pre-COVID) ritzy gatherings at nice hotels is extremely expensive.11 So where is the money coming from? I
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Noa Tishby (Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth)
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In order to lead a successful marketing and communications campaign, you must support key customer relations initiatives, integrate creative methods of branding, oversee execution of effective publicity, and focus on media pitching that will support PR and Social Media strategies.
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Germany Kent
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Both archetypes were familiar in Clintonworld: the cold-eyed, self-serving strategists who build up themselves by building up one Clinton or both and the sycophants who prove their loyalty to a Clinton by devoting their entire lives to the family. Hillary wanted them to coexist. But
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
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Steve Bannon, regardless of whatever else he may be, is first and foremost a strategist. And he has a knack for identifying issues that are the natural territory of his opponents but that they have neglected or betrayed, leaving themselves vulnerable to having parts of their base wooed away.
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Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World)
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Over the course of nearly a half-century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by U.S. strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs (Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, & Sustainable)
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It was typical of U.S. strategists, then and later, to leave European, North African, and Asian casualties entirely out of account in weighing the deterrent balance. And I don’t know of any instance of a president or any civilian official raising this point. In retrospect, that’s a startling commentary.
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Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
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The army leadership, taking these wishes of Hitler on board and also bearing in mind the outcome of the war games, had already adjusted its strategic thinking when, on 18 February, Hitler spoke of the favourable impression he had gained of Manstein’s plan the day before.42 The die was now cast. By chance, the basic thoughts of the amateur had coincided with the brilliantly unorthodox planning of the professional strategist. Further refined by the OKH, the Manstein plan gave Hitler what he wanted: a surprise assault in the most unexpected area which, though not without risk, had the boldness of genius. The
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Ian Kershaw (Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis)
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It’s one of the things I find most depressing about Trump. He’s trained his docile followers to believe in an America that is weaker, sadder, and smaller than we really are. I remain militantly optimistic about America, our rich talent and our amazing, messy, wonderful, ridiculous, crazy, passionate people. It’s too bad a central tenet of Trumpism is to run down the people of this country and describe a nation so lost and weak it requires an authoritarian strongman.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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The urban strategist Todd Litman summed up zoning’s effect thus: “It seemed that segregation was just the natural working of the free market, the result of the sum of countless individual choices about where to live. But the houses were single—and their residents white—because of the invisible hand of government.
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Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design)
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I found myself asking the big question in spy school that wasn't on any test:
How does a scholar, a strategist, or a soldier understand a culture well enough to predict future outcomes without being willing to understand that all humans, from their own perspectives, are living a truth and reality as valid as ours?
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Daniella Mestyanek Young (Uncultured: A Memoir)
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It is perhaps helpful to remember that war is a form of politics. Or, to put it as one of the great strategists of history, Carl von Clausewitz, phrased it, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”. This is not a metaphor, for as Clausewitz also wrote, “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will”. Cultural war of the sort in which the SJWs are engaged is an act of social pressure to compel their opponents to fulfill their will. So, while the means are different, the same strategies, and in some cases, even the same tactics, will apply to both war and cultural war alike.
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Vox Day (SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1))
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As the international relations scholar Hedley Bull noted, “mutual nuclear deterrence … does not make nuclear war impossible, but simply renders it irrational,” but then added that a rational strategist is one “who on further acquaintance reveals himself as a university professor of unusual intellectual subtlety.”86
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
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The changing trends reflected evolving user preferences, but they were also a reaction against the burnout-inducing standard of the peak influencer era. “We all know the jig is up,” said Matt Klein, a cultural strategist. “We’ve all participated in those staged photos. We all know the stress and anxiety it takes. And we can see through it. Culture is a pendulum and the pendulum is swaying. That’s not to say everyone is going to stop posting perfect photos. But the energy is shifting.” For the reigning influencers, the shift was disorienting and even catastrophic. “What worked for people before doesn’t work anymore,” said James Nord. In 2018, a creator could post a shot with manicured hands on a coffee cup and rake in the likes. By 2019, people would unfollow. According to Fohr, by the end of that year, 60 percent of influencers in his network with more than 100,000 followers were losing followers month over month. “It’s pretty staggering,” he said.
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Taylor Lorenz (Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet)
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I had almost forgotten he could be like this. Prince Rhen is a brilliant strategist and a consummate gentleman, but he can also be petty in the most creative of ways. The curse changed him-in truth, it changed us both-but it did not lessen his ability to be vindictive.
It did not lessen my ability to tolerate it either.
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Brigid Kemmerer (A Heart So Fierce and Broken (Cursebreakers, #2))
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Willing to fight for freedom alongside her warriors, Nzinga demonstrated bravery, intelligence, and a relentless drive to bring peace to her people. A true anti-terrorism strategist and an original freedom fighter. Queen Nzinga reflects the dignity of the Ndongos and Angola in particular, but of Africa and all women in general.
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Dom Pedro V (The Quantum Vision of Simon Kimbangu: Kintuadi in 3D)
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Facts, as Reagan famously said, are stubborn things. Truth and honesty are vital pillars of presidential leadership; they create an ineffable reservoir of goodwill for the moments when the man in the Oval Office can’t tell Americans all the details of a military or law enforcement operation. They are a buttress against attacks on his programs, his intentions, and his statements. Leadership demands trust. Trust that the president will keep his word, do as he promises, and deliver on commitments. Donald Trump, the Münchhausen of presidents, is a notorious serial liar and fabulist. He is a man who has boasted about his own dishonesty in life, marriage, and business.
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Rick Wilson (Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever)
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The highest-paid individuals are the visionaries, strategists, and creative problem solvers of the world. Your vision is greater than yourself. It gives you a soft direction to focus the goals and actions that stem from it. Your vision should be big, not limited by belief, and emotionally compelling when you marinate your mind in the growing detail.
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Dan Koe (The Art of Focus: Find Meaning, Reinvent Yourself and Create Your Ideal Future)
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I'll do it later", is where you burry your dreams
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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No one has a right to tell you what you want, what you need, or what you must have. So why let them?
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Loren Weisman
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When you get serious about your brand that is when the tide will shift.
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Germany Kent
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Success in branding will come when you position your business with the correct marketing and press execution, build authority, and produce results amid an ever-evolving landscape.
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Germany Kent
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Magangeni law of insight - read history - spiritual boldness - be present - insight. - Dr Lloyd Magangeni
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Dr Lloyd Magangeni (The Uncommon Strategist)
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You will have a much harder time dealing with a gnarly challenge if you have not distilled it down to a crux. No one solves a problem they cannot comprehend and hold in their mind.
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Richard P. Rumelt (The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists)
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The truth is that venture capital is invested not in plans but in the individuals who have proposed the venture and have committed themselves to running it.
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Richard P. Rumelt (The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists)
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Sharing the same exact content, message or advertisements over and over again only showcases your limited content and a serious lack of depth in your message.
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Loren Weisman
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Choose those you give your trust to carefully. Be caring; be loving; be creative. But also be careful.
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Loren Weisman (Music Business For Dummies)
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If you are saying the same thing as everyone else, then why would and why should anyone think you are different from everyone else?
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Loren Weisman
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It's time to respect yourself and your dream, both truly deserve that respect. be the person you would do anything for. Be the person you will not let down.
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Loren Weisman (The Artist's Guide to Success in the Music Business: The “Who, What, When, Where, Why & How” of the Steps that Musicians & Bands Have to Take to Succeed in Music)
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A puppet of manipulative politicians has always his own self-destructive hubris. ~ Angelica Hopes, The F. Trilogy
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Angelica Hopes
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Ignorance is the prison that most people are kept in
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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The key to keeping quality people around you is to become a person of quality yourself
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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By any means necessary, try your best to live your best life.
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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A status gets reactions.
A DM starts a conversation.
Likes mean nothing.
A conversation means everything.
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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Reading one page of a book and implementing is much better than reading the book to completion and doing nothing.
Books are meant to be used.
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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Methodically messaging in a harmony of honor, humility, authenticity and authority may create more resonation for your story to be heard by that many more connections.
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Loren Weisman
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Don't fall into the irresponsible trap of setting low prices.
It will kill your business cold.
Low prices attract cheap customers with luxurious demands.
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Mac Duke The Strategist
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If it comes from a pot that reads decaf, it is not coffee. If it comes from a nut, it is not milk.
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Loren Weisman
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After more than a thousand years," he continued, "an enemy finally broke through. Not because of superior firepower. Not because the Manchus were better fighters or strategists. They weren't. The Manchus breached the Great Wall and took Beijing because someone opened a gate. From the inside. As simple as that. A general, a traitor, let them in and an empire fell.
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Louise Penny (A Great Reckoning (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, #12))
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I spend a lot of time with young people now, bright, public-spirited kids from across the political spectrum who give me hope for the future...They want to have an impact, but they're not sure that politics is a viable path on which to do that.
Congress is going to meet with you or without you, I tell them. Don't turn away in disgust and leave those decisions to someone else. You don't like politics today? Grab the wheel of history and steer us to a better place. Run for office. Be a strategist or policy aide. Work for a government agency or a non-profit. Become a thoughtful, probing journalist. Get in the arena. Help shape the world in which you're going to live. At a minimum, be the engaged citizen a healthy democracy demands.
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David Axelrod
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Out in the living room, the strategists were watching Fox News, and sure enough, there was the video of Andy, saying, “Um . . . yeah. My dad’s the president.” And sure enough, he did sound like an asshole. I burst out laughing and Nancy turned from the news to nod at me. “Thank God we’ve got you and not him,” she said, to resounding agreement from all the gathered staff.
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Jennifer Marie Thorne (The Wrong Side of Right)
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Legendary strategist Maj Gen Carl von Clausewitz cuts to the chase with characteristic brutal clarity: “The soldier trade, if it is to mean anything at all, has to be anchored to an unshakable code of honor. Otherwise, those of us who follow the drums become nothing more than a bunch of hired assassins walking around in gaudy clothes . . . a disgrace to God and mankind.”6
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Shannon E. French (The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present)
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Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen. In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory. When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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Marketing and promoting doesn’t come down to the likes, the pins, the plus ones, the followers, the fans, the friends, the views, or the plays online. Marketing and promoting comes down to the conversions.
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Loren Weisman (The Artist's Guide to Success in the Music Business: The “Who, What, When, Where, Why & How” of the Steps that Musicians & Bands Have to Take to Succeed in Music)
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Republican strategist Peter Wehner says, “Trumpism is not a political philosophy; it is a purposeful effort, led by a demagogue, to incite ugly passions, stoke resentments and divisions, and create fear of those who are not like ‘us’—Mexicans, Muslims, and Syrian refugees. But it will not end there. There will always be fresh targets.” Conservative evangelical Wehner contrasts that with the principles of Jesus, saying, “[A] carpenter from Nazareth offered a very different philosophy. When you see a wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, Jesus taught, you should not pass him by. ‘Truly I say to you,’ he said in Matthew, ‘to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me.’ . . . At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth.”15 Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and top policy adviser to George W. Bush, and an originator of “compassionate conservatism,” says, [O]ur faith involves a common belief with unavoidably public consequences: Christians are to love their neighbor, and everyone is their neighbor. All the appearances of difference—in race, ethnicity, nationality and accomplishment
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Jim Wallis (Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus)
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The success of law and order rhetoric among working-class whites and the intense resentment of racial reforms, particularly in the South, led conservative Republican analysts to believe that a “new majority” could be created by the Republican Party, one that included the traditional Republican base, the white South, and half the Catholic, blue-collar vote of the big cities.50 Some conservative political strategists admitted that appealing to racial fears and antagonisms was central to this strategy, though it had to be done surreptitiously. H.R. Haldeman, one of Nixon’s key advisers, recalls that Nixon himself deliberately pursued a Southern, racial strategy: “He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”51
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
“
I’ve always thought that the blue-collar vote had to be a source of his strength,” said Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern’s main strategist. “It always seemed to me that McGovern—not as the anti-war candidate but as the ‘change’ candidate—would appeal more to Middle America than he would to any other group. They’re the ones with the most to gain from change and they’re the ones who get screwed by the way we do business in this country.
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Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)
“
Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running. Plouffe
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Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
“
Just as the full absurdity of Trump was sinking in, crushing any hope that he would turn “presidential,” Putin, in the American imagination, was turning into a brilliant strategist, a skilled secret agent who was plotting the end of the Western world. In fact, Putin was and remains a poorly educated, underinformed, incurious man whose ambition is vastly out of proportion to his understanding of the world. To the extent that he has any interest in the business of governing, it is solely his own role—on the world stage or on Russian television—that concerns him. Whether he is attending a summit, piloting a plane, or hang gliding with Siberian cranes, it is the spectacle of power that interests him. In this, he and Trump are alike: to them, power is the beginning and the end of government, the presidency, politics—and public politics is only the performance of power.
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Masha Gessen (Surviving Autocracy)
“
A good Public Relations agent can help you gain exposure and grow your popularity and often get you in the right places, but they cannot help those who refuse to birth new possibilities and move out of their comfort zones.
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Germany Kent
“
One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever harsher criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was important to know not to say anything positive to Trump about Bannon. Even faint praise before the “but”—“Steve is obviously smart, but…”—could produce a scowl and pout if you didn’t hurry to the “but.” (Then again, saying anyone was “smart” invariably incurred Trump’s annoyance.)
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Michael Wolff (Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House)
“
As the Public Relations Expert, your focus has to be on managing the creative development and production of all marketing campaigns and initiatives. The responsibility for branding, advertising, and promotional collateral is all yours.
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Germany Kent
“
What a Shinobi Should Keep in Mind to Know the Enemy: It is essential for a shinobi monomi [covert scout] to speculate deeply about the way the enemy is. However, you should not report what is not reasonable enough to report. The commander in chief, troop commanders, or strategists make their strategy about the enemy based on the information given from the above covert scouts. This is critical to defense; whether the information is reliable or not is of vital importance.
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Yoshie Minami (The Secret Traditions of the Shinobi: Hattori Hanzo's Shinobi Hiden and Other Ninja Scrolls)
“
When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
“
noblemen—“all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs.”33 This was the great charter, the Magna Carta. Magna Carta had been revoked almost immediately after it was written, and it had become altogether obscure by the time of King James and his battles with the ungovernable Edward Coke. But Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s
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Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
“
Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.
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Susan Casey (Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins)
“
I don’t actually know what I know until I work to write it down. The process of writing reveals contradictions, weak arguments, and places where more data is needed to back up an opinion. And it helps sort out the important from the less important
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Richard P. Rumelt (The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists)
“
13. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. [Ch’en Hao says: “He plans no superfluous marches, he devises no futile attacks.” The connection of ideas is thus explained by Chang Yu: “One who seeks to conquer by sheer strength, clever though he may be at winning pitched battles, is also liable on occasion to be vanquished; whereas he who can look into the future and discern conditions that are not yet manifest, will never make a blunder and therefore invariably win.”] Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. 14. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. [A “counsel of perfection” as Tu Mu truly observes. “Position” need not be confined to the actual ground occupied by the troops. It includes all the arrangements and preparations which a wise general will make to increase the safety of his army.] 15. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory. [Ho Shih thus expounds the paradox: “In warfare, first lay plans which will ensure victory, and then lead your army to battle; if you will not begin with stratagem but rely on brute strength alone, victory will no longer be assured.”] 16. The consummate leader cultivates the moral law, and strictly adheres to method and discipline; thus it is in his power to control success. 17. In respect of military method, we have, firstly, Measurement; secondly, Estimation of quantity; thirdly, Calculation; fourthly, Balancing of chances; fifthly, Victory. 18. Measurement owes its existence to Earth; Estimation of quantity to Measurement; Calculation to Estimation of quantity; Balancing of chances to Calculation; and Victory to Balancing of chances. [It is not easy to distinguish the four terms very clearly in the Chinese. The
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
is, not to the people, but to noblemen—“all the liberties written out below, to have and to keep for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs.”33 This was the great charter, the Magna Carta. Magna Carta had been revoked almost immediately after it was written, and it had become altogether obscure by the time of King James and his battles with the ungovernable Edward Coke. But Coke, as brilliant a political strategist as he was a legal scholar, resurrected it in the 1620s and began calling it England’s “ancient
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Jill Lepore (These Truths: A History of the United States)
“
If someone is trying to sell you with only past credentials and older accolades without including present examples and up to date proof, you might be dealing with someone that is sharing expired information and does not have the up to date knowledge to help you.
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Loren Weisman
“
It is often said that a strategy is a choice or a decision. The words “choice” and “decision” evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them. There is, in fact, a formal theory of decisions that specifies exactly how to make a choice by identifying alternative actions, valuing outcomes, and appraising probabilities of events. The problem with this view, and the reason it barely lightens a leader’s burden, is that you are rarely handed a clear set of alternatives. In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide. Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed a novel response. Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions—are more constructed than chosen. In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory. When someone says “Managers are decision makers,” they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.
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Richard P. Rumelt (Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters)
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Once you realize it’s not your job to be a brand, your energy shifts. You embrace the cultural legacy you wish to build. You don’t wonder how to be authentic. You are authentic. You don’t succumb to trends. You exist beyond them. You tell your unique story. You create your world.
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Joy Donnell (Beyond Brand: Master Your Power, Joy, and Media To Live Your Legacy)
“
WikiLeaks told us how keen the Coalition is to exploit the boats. In late 2009, in the dying days of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Opposition, a “key Liberal party strategist” popped in to the US embassy in Canberra to say how pleased the party was that refugee boats were, once again, making their way to Christmas Island. “The issue was ‘fantastic,’” he said. “And ‘the more boats that come the better.’” But he admitted they had yet to find a way to make the issue work in their favour: “his research indicated only a ‘slight trend’ towards the Coalition.
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David Marr (Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47])
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Issues or fears of confrontation tend to showcase unhealthy and unprofessional communication. If you are trusting someone to tell you all the good, bad and ugly, but they only give you the good out of their fears and confrontational issues… the bad and the ugly can grow worse and worse quickly.
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Loren Weisman
“
The euro fell to as low as $1.18605, its weakest level since March 2006, having fallen below an important support at $1.20. The common currency last traded at $1.1926, down 0.6 percent from late U.S. trade on Friday. In an interview with German financial daily Handelsblatt published on Friday, ECB President Mario Draghi said the risk of the central bank not fulfilling its mandate of preserving price stability was higher now than half a year ago. "The market took his comments to mean that he is ready to adopt quantitative easing," said Shin Kadota, chief forex strategist at Barclays in Tokyo.
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Anonymous
“
Consider choosing the "here is how" over the "I know you can" types.
Consider connecting with those that have the authority and ability to show, educate and help you create what you want...
instead of those that only focus on vague directions, hearsay instructions, empty motivation and scripted hype.
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Loren Weisman
“
We humans almost universally have a false self-image of our species. We think that monstrous, wicked policies must be, can only be, conceived and directed and carried out by monsters, wicked or evil people, or highly aberrant, clinically “disturbed” people. People not like “us.” That is mistaken. Those who have created a continuing nuclear threat to the existence of humanity have been normal, ordinary politicians, analysts, and military strategists. To them and to their subordinates, Hannah Arendt’s controversial proposition regarding the “banality of evil” I believe applies, though it might better have been stated as the “banality of evildoing, and of most evildoers.
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Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
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Black women have long been the backbone of our political progressive past: the strategists and protesters and organizers and volunteers, the women who've gotten out the vote and licked the envelopes, pioneered the thinking that led to the revolutions. Yet they've been only barely represented in leadership of the political parties they've bolstered, their policy priorities have often gone unaddressed and unrecognized; their participation has long been taken for granted. And when white women have caught up to where black women have been for a long time, the work of the black women has often been appropriated, ignored, and uncredited by those with greater economic, cultural, and racial advantage.
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Rebecca Traister (Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger)
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People learn best and fastest from making their own mistakes and fixing them. It’s painful to watch a child flounder, but in the long run children become more resilient and resourceful if they have to deal with failure once in a while. One of the biggest fears of today’s business strategists is that we are producing a coddled workforce of straight “A” students who are afraid to go out on a limb for fear they’ll fall. American innovation was born out of metaphorical scraped knees and bloody noses. A generation that’s been told they shouldn’t even touch a doorknob without applying antibacterial hand sanitizer may not have the rough and tumble qualities needed to compete in a global dog-eat-dog economy.
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Lynne C. Lancaster (The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace – From Generational Experts: Understanding Born 1982-2000 Talent)
“
Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, the leading nineteenth-century Prussian strategist, was said to have laughed only twice: once when told that a certain French fortress was impregnable, and once when his mother-in-law died. Martin Heidegger, whom some regard as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century but many find incomprehensible, was even more sparing of his mirth. He is recorded to have laughed only once, at a picnic with Ernst Jünger in the Harz Mountains. Jünger leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack. Heidegger let out a shout of glee, but immediately checked himself, “and his facial expression reverted to its habitual ferocity.
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Paul Johnson (Humorists: From Hogarth to Noel Coward – Captivating Biographical Portraits of the Western World's Greatest Wits)
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In any group of dolphins you’ll find cliques and posses, duos and trios and quartets, mothers and babies and spinster aunts, frisky bands of horny teenage males, wily hunters, burly bouncers, sage elders—and their associations are anything but random. Dolphins are strategists. They’re also highly social chatterboxes who recognize themselves in the mirror, count, cheer, giggle, feel despondent, stroke each other, adorn themselves, use tools, make jokes, play politics, enjoy music, bring presents on a date, introduce themselves, rescue one another from dangerous situations, deduce, infer, manipulate, improvise, form alliances, throw tantrums, gossip, scheme, empathize, seduce, grieve, comfort, anticipate, fear, and love—just like us.
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Susan Casey (Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins)
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Social media is not toxic. Social media sites are not toxic. It might just be that you've allowed the toxic people you follow on social media to make it toxic for you. There is no rule, no law or no condition on any of these sites that says you must continue to follow or stay connected with someone you don't want to on social media. Unfollow, disconnect and block if need be and as often as you like.
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Loren Weisman
“
Surely you know the Thirty-Six Stratagems.” I shook my head. “The ancient Chinese art of deception.” “Oh, right. Sun Tzu. Jay Stoddard’s favorite.” “Forget Sun Tzu’s Art of War. That’s so commonplace.” He held up a gnarled, age-spotted finger. “Far more interesting than Sun Tzu is Chu-ko Liang. Perhaps the most brilliant military strategist ever. One of his stratagems was to defeat your enemy from within. Infiltrate the enemy’s camp in the guise of cooperation or surrender. Then, once you’ve discovered the source of his weakness, you strike.” Somehow the setting—the visitors’ room of the Altamont Correctional Facility—made my father’s advice a little less authoritative. As I walked out of the visitors’ room, I savored a feeling of relief. Because at that moment I knew that my brother was alive.
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Joseph Finder (Vanished (Nick Heller, #1))
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Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better.
[…] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done.
Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth?
If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?
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Jonathan Safran Foer (We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast)
“
We have a better understanding today of what triggered such a furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, interviewed the General Chief of Staff and strategists in the Ministry of Defence and offered inside knowledge on the way these officials and generals were thinking about the issue.12 Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the IDF was a frustrated outfit following its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in Lebanon, who had forced the army to withdraw totally from Lebanon. There was a fear that this retreat made the army look weak. And so a show of strength was much needed.
The reassertion of dominance within the occupied Palestinian territories was just the kind of display of sheer power the ‘invincible’ Israeli army needed
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Ilan Pappé (The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories)
“
Genisys, a Google Adwords-certified leading Digital Marketing Agency is operating multi facet digital services throughout India specializing in Web development, Web design, Software development, Digital marketing services which include-SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SMM (Social Media Marketing), PPC(Pay Per Click), Email marketing, Content marketing, Mobile marketing, Affiliate marketing, Brand marketing and promotion, inbound marketing, Local Business Marketing, Business listing solution, Video brochure, Ecommerce solution, CRM service, Reputation Management, Online Presence analysis, Conversion Rate Optimization, Goggle service and so on to keep up with the high-tech advanced digital world and connecting the clients goal to reality through creative designers, digital strategists and specialized innovative team.
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Genisys
“
The qualities of a successful military strategist will change from person to person, but there are a central few that all of them need. These include, above all else, strategic judgment, but also stamina, interpersonal skills and a feel for people; an ability to energize, inspire and motivate; the ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; a degree of personal presence and charisma; a sincere love of servicemen and women; an ability to be tough when needed, but also compassionate when that is appropriate; fortitude in the face of adversity and the capacity to stay calm in the midst of chaos; an ability to deal with setbacks, missteps and mistakes; a sense of what leadership style is required to bring out the best in those immediately below, and also for the organization collectively. A great strategic leader also needs to be able to foresee how a conflict will end.
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David H. Petraeus (Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine)
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seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)
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Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
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She Is Remarkable
Salute to the woman who knows who she is
And why she is who she is
A powerful being
Once thrown into the deep end of the ocean
But swam her way back to shore
She never stops moving forward
Nothing can ever pull her backwards
Such a brave warrior
Shout out to the superwoman
Determined to change the status quo
Because she feels the need to do so
Just like an eagle
She soars higher and higher
As the wind blows stronger
She does not let anything deter her
From reaching another level in life
Thumbs up to an amazing woman
A great force to be reckoned with
That committed Mother on the street
Who trades from sunrise to sunset
Trying to make ends meet
Oh, she has a heart so big
Being mindful that come snow or sunshine
She has mouths to feed
I revere this gifted woman
Who uses her creativity
To make an impact in society
Despite the uniqueness of her talent
She remains a trendsetter
It could be the potter in whose hands clay becomes magic
The miner who touches gold, before it even gets sold to the markets
Or the strategist who sits in high-level meetings, making sure organisations do not collapse
A special mention to the special woman
Who chooses not to give up
She understands that others look up to her
The smart lady out there, with a clear vision
She makes things happen for her family, community, and the world at large
She deserves a badge of honour
Because she is remarkable!
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Gift Gugu Mona (From My Mother's Classroom: A Badge of Honour for a Remarkable Woman)
“
Chinese seek victory not in a decisive battle but through incremental moves designed to gradually improve their position. To quote Kissinger again: “Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash: elaborate multi-year maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.”48 In an instructive analogy, David Lai illustrates this by comparing the game of chess with its Chinese equivalent, weiqi—often referred to as go. In chess, players seek to dominate the center and conquer the opponent. In weiqi, players seek to surround the opponent. If the chess master sees five or six moves ahead, the weiqi master sees twenty or thirty. Attending to every dimension in the broader relationship with the adversary, the Chinese strategist resists rushing prematurely toward victory, instead aiming to build incremental advantage. “In the Western tradition, there is a heavy emphasis on the use of force; the art of war is largely limited to the battlefields; and the way to fight is force on force,” Lai explains. By contrast, “The philosophy behind go is to compete for relative gain rather than seeking complete annihilation of the opponent forces.” In a wise reminder, Lai warns that “It is dangerous to play go with the chess mindset. One can become overly aggressive so that he will stretch his force thin and expose his vulnerable parts in the battlefields.
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Graham Allison (Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?—A Critical Examination of Historical Patterns Leading to War Between Great Powers)
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Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.
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John Dickerson (The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency)
“
Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.
The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war.
Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. "Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones - you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states".
A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: "they will spend large sums of money on their wives".
These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy - wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of parts and the lust of the spoils of office.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth.
In rather case the end is revolution.
When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims, but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease.
Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power.
But even democracy ruins itself by excess – of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy.
This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses.
As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them; to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course.
The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protected of the people” rises to supreme power. (Consider the history of Rome).
The more Plato thinks of it, the more astounded he is at the folly of leaving to mob caprice and gullibility the selection of political officials – not to speak of leaving it to those shady and wealth-serving strategists who pull the oligarchic wires behind the democratic stage.
Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters – like shoe-making – we think only a specially-trained person will server our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state.
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Will Durant (The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers)
“
I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.
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Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi: My Story)
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extent, Polly Lear took Fanny Washington’s place: she was a pretty, sociable young woman who became Martha’s closest female companion during the first term, at home or out and about, helping plan her official functions. The Washingtons were delighted with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, a southern planter of similar background to themselves, albeit a decade younger; if not a close friend, he was someone George had felt an affinity for during the years since the Revolution, writing to him frequently for advice. The tall, lanky redhead rented lodgings on Maiden Lane, close to the other members of the government, and called on the president on Sunday afternoon, March 21. One of Jefferson’s like-minded friends in New York was the Virginian James Madison, so wizened that he looked elderly at forty. Madison was a brilliant parliamentary and political strategist who had been Washington’s closest adviser and confidant in the early days of the presidency, helping design the machinery of government and guiding measures through the House, where he served as a representative. Another of Madison’s friends had been Alexander Hamilton, with whom he had worked so valiantly on The Federalist Papers. But the two had become estranged over the question of the national debt. As secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was charged with devising a plan to place the nation’s credit on a solid basis at home and abroad. When Hamilton presented his Report on the Public Credit to Congress in January, there was an instant split, roughly geographic, north vs. south. His report called for the assumption of state debts by the nation, the sale of government securities to fund this debt, and the creation of a national bank. Washington had become convinced that Hamilton’s plan would provide a strong economic foundation for the nation, particularly when he thought of the weak, impoverished Congress during the war, many times unable to pay or supply its troops. Madison led the opposition, incensed because he believed that dishonest financiers and city slickers would be the only ones to benefit from the proposal, while poor veterans and farmers would lose out. Throughout the spring, the debate continued. Virtually no other government business got done as Hamilton and his supporters lobbied fiercely for the plan’s passage and Madison and his followers outfoxed them time and again in Congress. Although pretending to be neutral, Jefferson was philosophically and personally in sympathy with Madison. By April, Hamilton’s plan was voted down and seemed to be dead, just as a new debate broke out over the placement of the national capital. Power, prestige, and a huge economic boost would come to the city named as capital. Hamilton and the bulk of New Yorkers and New Englanders
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Patricia Brady (Martha Washington: An American Life)