Top 96 Quotes & Sayings by Jim Mattis - Page 2

As commanders and staff officers, we are coaches and sentries for our units: how can we coach anything if we don't know a hell of a lot more than just the TTPs?

I like the enemy knowing there are a few guys like me around.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

I consider ISIS nothing more than an excuse for Iran to continue its mischief.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don't think our veterans should join those ranks.

To Marines, love of liberty is not an empty phrase... Rather, it's displayed by blood, sweat, and tears for the fallen.

For a sitting U.S. president to see our allies as freeloaders is nuts.

I was a Marine for 41 years, and it wasn't long enough. We enjoy putting on that uniform.

Putin goes to bed at night knowing he can break all the rules, and the West will follow all the rules.

Now from a distance, I look back on what the Corps taught me: to think like men of action, and to act like men of thought!

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.

The Corps is in good hands, and it's been a privilege to serve with the Leathernecks. Now it's time to go.

Iran is not an enemy of ISIS; they have a lot to gain from the turmoil that ISIS creates.

I'm on record that it didn't really traumatize me to do away with some people.

I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans, and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don't buy it.

For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned - take our post-traumatic growth - and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear.

What is the one country in the Middle East that has not been attacked by ISIS? One. That is Iran. That is more than happenstance, I'm sure.

I've lived a very colorful life, and I've said some things, But not once have I taken them back, and I've never apologized for them - and I won't.

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

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.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

We all recognize that the Mid-east is dissolving into crises, and we know terrorism did not start with 9-11.

The U.S. military is not war weary. Our military draws strength from confronting our enemies when clear policy objectives are set and we are fully resourced for the fight.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq's Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq's Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

The example that America knows how to govern itself is one of the compelling aspects of our national security.

Basically, Islamic State is a combined al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah on steroids, destabilizing the region, dissolving borders/changing the political geography in the Mid-east, and hardening political positions that make Mid-east peace-building more remote by the day.

Since coming back from overseas, this is more of a foreign country than the places overseas. I don't understand it. It's like America has lost faith in rational thought.

I don't write policy for my government.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.

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.

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy's will are not allowed that luxury.

I have never been bewildered for long in any fight with our enemies - I was Armed with Insight.

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!

We should not fight wars without a clearly defined end state... when you go to war, it can't be a half-step.

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.