The most important 6 inches on the battlefield is between your ears.
Jim Mattis
There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.
Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
In this age, I don't care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are: if you cannot create harmony - even vicious harmony - on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.
Be the hunter, not the hunted.
There is no God-given right to victory on the battlefield. You win that through the skill and the devotion, the valor and the ferocity of your troops.
Marines don't know how to spell the word 'defeat'.
There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.
I don't worry about stress. I create it.
To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase... Rather, it's displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.
No war is over until the enemy says it's over.
I don't lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.
We know that in tough times, cynicism is just another way to give up, and in the military, we consider cynicism or giving up simply as forms of cowardice.
So long as our Corps fields such Marines, America has nothing to fear from tyrants, be they Fascists, Communists or Tyrants with Medieval Ideology. For we serve in a Corps with no institutional confusion about our purpose: To fight! To fight well!
In my line of work, the enemy gets a vote.
For the mission's sake, for our country's sake, and the sake of the men who carried the Division's colors in past battles - carry out your mission and keep your honor clean.
Demonstrate to the world, there is 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy' than a U.S. Marine.
Treachery has existed as long as there's been warfare, and there's always been a few people that you couldn't trust.
It's not an easy course. It's not designed to be. We're not here to get you in touch with your inner child.
There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.
I don't have the best track record with quotes.
I'm on record that it didn't really traumatize me to do away with some people.
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.
You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.
There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.
The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.
No matter how bad any situation, cynicism has no positive impact. Watching the news, you might notice that cynicism and victimhood often seem to go hand-in-hand, but not for veterans.
The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.
Fight with a happy heart.
I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn't waste their lives because I didn't have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.
No one gives a damn what Iran thinks on any significant issue. The only reason Iran is at the big boys' table is because of their nuclear weapons program.
I've had some 'riotous excursions of the human spirit' alongside the young Sailors and Marines, and it's time to leave the stage to the young leaders who got their rank the old-fashioned way - they earned their stripes in combat.
You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.
I would storm the gates of Hell if Third Marine Air Wing was overhead.
Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.
Wherever the enemy wants to fight, we will follow him to the ends of the Earth. We'll adapt, we'll train, we'll advise, we'll mentor, and we'll fight, and we'll fight well.
I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.
Putin goes to bed at night knowing he can break all the rules, and the West will follow all the rules.
Don't create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.
Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed... It doesn't give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.
Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn't happen. If that's the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.
PowerPoint makes us stupid.
Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.
In a country with millions of people and cars going everywhere, the enemy is going to get a car bomb out there once in awhile.
If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.
There is only one 'retirement plan' for terrorists.
The Corps is in good hands, and it's been a privilege to serve with the Leathernecks. Now it's time to go.
I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.
There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.
