The most important 6 inches on the battlefield is between your ears.

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.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

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across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.

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

Be the hunter, not the hunted.

Marines don't know how to spell the word 'defeat'.

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.

I don't worry about stress. I create it.

There is nothing better than getting shot at and missed. It's really great.

No war is over until the enemy says it's over.

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!

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.

Demonstrate to the world, there is 'No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy' than a U.S. Marine.

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.

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.

In my line of work, the enemy gets a vote.

Treachery has existed as long as there's been warfare, and there's always been a few people that you couldn't trust.

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.

There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.

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.

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.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

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 must reward the kind of behavior that you want.

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.

I don't have the best track record with quotes.

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.

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

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

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

The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.

There is only one 'retirement plan' for terrorists.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Policy makers who have never served in the military continue to use the military to lead social change in this country.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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.

Notifying the enemy in advance of our withdrawal dates or reassuring the enemy that we will not use certain capabilities like our ground forces should be avoided.

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