It's very hard to live with yourself if you don't stick with your moral code.

Fight with a happy heart.

There are many people who do not know if the U.S. Army has 60,000 men or 6 million. They do not have a clue about that.

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

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.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

There's no way that that our military power will not erode if a robust American economic revival is not part of the cards.

By reading, you learn through others' experiences, generally, a better way to do business, especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.

You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

Some people feel affronted when something they thought to be true doesn't happen. If that's the case, then your sense of risk is much higher, and that leads to risk aversion. You need to be able to be comfortable in uncertainty.

It's a lot easier to stay idealistic if you don't sign two to five next-of-kin letters every day.

In a country with millions of people and cars going everywhere, the enemy is going to get a car bomb out there once in awhile.

The economy's always been the engine for our national security.

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?

What we achieved was a nuclear pause, not a nuclear halt.

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

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.

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

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.

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.

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

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

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.