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“Do nothing but be prepared to do anything.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Strong combat leadership is never by committee. Platoon commanders must command, and command in battle isn't based on consensus. It's based on consent. Any leader wields only as much authority and influence as is conferred by the consent of those he leads. The Marines allowed me to be their commander, and they could revoke their permission at any time.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Complex ideas must be made simple, or they'll remain ideas and never be put into action.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Tell me what to do, not how to do it.' Decentralize command and allow subordinates to operate freely within the framework of the commander's intent. Train them as a team. Develop trust, loyalty, initiative.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“You can’t volunteer to go to war and then bitch about getting shot at.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Great Marine commanders, like all great warriors, are able to kill that which they love most -- their men.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“I thought I was losing my mind. The only way I knew I was still sane was that I thought I might be going crazy. Surely, that awareness meant I was sane. Crazy people think they're sane. Only sane people can thing they're crazy. I was reduced to taking comfort in a tautology.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“VJ had gone to the Naval Academy, where he competed as a powerlifter and developed a distaste for military customs such as short hair and addressing people by rank.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“The rule of captivity is to bend, not break.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Worst of all were the accolades and thanks from people "for what you guys did over there." Thanks for what, I wanted to ask—shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people's homes?”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Marine training is essentially a psychological battle against the instinct for self-preservation.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Tactical catastrophes are rarely the outcome of a single poor decision. Small compromises incrementally close off options until a commander is forced into actions he would never choose freely.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Safety is paramount.” “If safety were paramount,” Whitmer declared, “we’d stay in the barracks and play pickup basketball. Good training is paramount.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“You’re quoted as saying, ‘The bad news is, we won’t get much sleep tonight; the good news is, we get to kill people.’” She paused, as if waiting for me to disavow the quote. I was silent, and she went on. “We have a retired Army officer on our staff, and he warned me that there are people who enjoy killing, and they aren’t nice to be around. Could you please explain your quote for me?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Well, do you really feel that way?” Her tone was earnest, almost pleading.
“You mean, will I climb your clock tower and pick people off with a hunting rifle?”
It was her turn to be silent.
“No, I will not. Do I feel compelled to explain myself to you? I don’t.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“We learned that indecision is a decision, that inaction has a cost all its own. Good commanders act and create opportunities. Great commanders ruthlessly exploit those opportunities”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“The Marines,' my dad said, 'will teach you everything I love you too much to teach you.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Infantry Marines live only and forever in the real world.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“The Marine transformation is one of American life's storied tests.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“Our goals were redundancy and mutual support.”
― quote from One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
“If we're mad, we're mad in large numbers, at least larger than yours.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from The Goose Girl
“The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.”
― Robert Penn Warren, quote from All the King's Men
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.
But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many--perhaps most--of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven--or hell.
How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.
Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however are asking; 'Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?'
Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey
“I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, golden and so clean it quivers.”
― Leif Enger, quote from Peace Like a River
“I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters.”
― Peter S. Beagle, quote from The Last Unicorn
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Clear and Present Da...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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