Jim Mattis Quotes

It’s a lot of fun to fight.

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

The military can buy our diplomats some time.

I consider ISIS nothing more than an excuse for Iran to continue its mischief.

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.

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.

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

There is only one ‘retirement plan‘ for terrorists.

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.

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

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

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?

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

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

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

The fundamental question I believe is, ‘Is political Islam in our best interest?’ If not, what is our policy to authoritatively support the countervailing forces?

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned – take our post-traumatic growth – and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear.

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.

Basically, Islamic State is a combined al Qaeda and Lebanese Hezbollah on steroids, destabilizing the region, dissolving borders/changing the political geography in the Mid-east, and hardening political positions that make Mid-east peace-building more remote by the day.

I would just say there is one misperception of our veterans, and that is they are somehow damaged goods. I don’t buy it.

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.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‘defeat‘.

Gains achieved at great cost against our enemy in Afghanistan are reversible.

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.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

I don’t write policy for my government.

There are a lot of self-imposed restrictions by people who somehow believe they have to fall in with a certain military cant. There was always a sense that we had to put things into words that would touch our troops‘ hearts, not just their heads.

Be the hunter, not the hunted.

In an interconnected age when opportunistic adversaries can work in tandem to destroy stability and prosperity, our country needs to regain its strategic footing. We need to bring the clarity to our efforts before we lose the confidence of the American people and the support of potential allies.

Iran is not an enemy of ISIS; they have a lot to gain from the turmoil that ISIS creates.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I would storm the gates of Hell if Third Marine Air Wing was overhead.

Putin goes to bed at night knowing he can break all the rules, and the West will follow all the rules.

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.

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.

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq‘s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

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.