When you take up a sword, you must feel intent on cutting up the enemy. As you cut an enemy you must not change your grip, and your hands must not cower. - Miyamoto Musashi

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed? - Axel Oxenstierna

We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it. - Thomas Aquinas

A group of such young penitents will say: Let us repent our national sins. What they mean is: Let us attribute to our neighbor, even our Christian neighbor in the cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy. Such an escape from personal repentance into that tempting region where passions have the privilege to work and never hear the sound of their own names, would be welcome to the moral cowardice of anyone. But it is doubly attractive to the young intellectual. - C. S. Lewis

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win. - John F. Kennedy

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. - Edmund Burke

The most just war is one which is founded upon undoubted rights, and which, in addition, promises to the state advantages commensurate with the sacrifices required and the hazards incurred. Unfortunately, in our times there are so many doubtful and contested rights that most wars, though apparently based upon bequests, or wills, or marriages, are in reality but wars of expediency. - Antoine-Henri Jomini

There is no lack of carefree generals who are never worried or harassed. They are never bothered about anything: “I advance. Follow me,” and off the columns march in incredible disorder. Were ten raiders to fall shouting upon the column, this disorder would dissolve into a rout, a disaster. But these gentlemen never contemplate such an eventuality. They are lucky. They are the great men of the day— until the instant some disaster overtakes them. - Ardant du Picq

The focus of applied methods of conflict has altered in the direction of the broad use of political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures—applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population. - Valery Gerasimov

What is needed, then, is a continuous agitation produced artificially even when nothing in the events of the day justifies or arouses excitement. Therefore, continuing propaganda must slowly create a climate first, and then prevent the individual from noticing a particular propaganda operation in contrast to ordinary daily events. - Jacques Ellul

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us. - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Now, if these men have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God. War is His beadle, war is His vengeance, so that here men are punished for before-breach of the King’s laws in now the King’s quarrel. Where they feared the death, they have borne life away; and where they would be safe, they perish. Then, if they die unprovided, no more is the King guilty of their damnation than he was before guilty of those impieties for the which they are now visited. Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own. - William Shakespeare