James Mattis Quotes

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

The American people and the American military will never get used to civilian casualties. And we will - we will fight against that every way we can possibly bring our intelligence and our tactics to bear. We're not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys.

We face now an era where we're going to be fighting the terrorist threat. I mean, that's simply a reality we are going to have to address that one.

I find it disturbing that no member of the Senate Armed Services Committee is willing to acknowledge that record of failure and to ask our next secretary of defense what he proposes to do to amend that sorry record.

I would consider the principal threats to start with Russia. And it would certainly include any nations that are looking to intimidate nations around their periphery, regional nations nearby them, whether it be with weapons of mass destruction or I would call it unusual, unorthodox means of intimidating them.

A country that armed Stalin to defeat Hitler can certainly work alongside enemies of al-Qaida to defeat al-Qaida.

Nothing keeps me awake at night. I keep other people awake at night.

PowerPoint makes us stupid.

The United States has been essentially engaged in an ongoing war that most people date from 2001. That war has taken us to Afghanistan, to Iraq, in a lesser way to other countries - Libya, Somalia, Yemen.

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

General [James] Mattis's primary experience - indeed, his only experience - is as a member of the United States Marine Corps, where he served for 41 years. That's his experience.

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

An untrained or uneducated Marine ... deployed to the combat zone is a bigger threat to mission accomplishment ... than the enemy.

No war is over until the enemy says it's over. We may think it over, we may declare it over, but in fact, the enemy gets a vote.

I don't lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it's going to be bad.

You can overcome wrong technology. Your people have the initiative, they see the problem, no big deal ... you can't overcome bad culture. You've gotta change whoever is in charge.

It is mostly a matter of wills. Whose will is going to break first? Ours or the enemy's?

You've been told that you're broken, that you're damaged goods and should be labeled victims. I don't buy it. The truth, instead, is that you are the only folks with the skills, determination, and values to ensure American dominance in this chaotic world.

You've been told that you're broken. That you're damaged goods ... there is also Post-Traumatic Growth. You come back from war stronger and more sure of who you are.

I'm from the American West. We have forest fires out there. And some of the worst forest fires in our history, the most damage were caused when we pulled the fire crews off the line too early. And so we're going to have to continue to keep the pressure on the enemy - ISIS. There's no room for complacency on this.

We can kill lots of people. We do kill lots of people. We can destroy virtually anything we choose to destroy.

Our world is becoming darker. The dangers are increasing from North Korea, whose recent provocation underscored the need to impose a higher price on this rogue regime, a problem that is not just the United States alone, but a problem for us all.

The destruction that we have wreaked in the various theaters in which we've been engaged is really quite astonishing. But again, lethality, destruction, killing doesn't seem to achieve our objectives. So, my own sense is that a lack of lethality does not define the core problem.