141 Quotes by Jim Mattis

If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.

Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game.

Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake – and I made many – the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right.

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who – a decade or a thousand decades ago – set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you.

Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.

I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission.

If there’s something you don’t want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you’re doing.

Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims – we could always create options.

You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.