James Stockdale Quotes

The guy that just arranges things so that the stock market holds up is nobody in my - in my estimation

The worst thing that can happen is death, and that's not the worst thing in the world either.

I was tortured fifteen times, thats total submission. They did that with shutting off your blood circulation with ropes, giving you claustrophobia and pain at the same time, bending you double.

He's a novice, but he's had these - he's experienced in leadership in tight circumstances. He started - he dropped the first bomb, led the first air strike into North Vietnam.

The challenge of education is not to prepare a person for success, but to prepare him for failure.

Entitlement and privelege corrupt.

A liberally educated person meets new ideas with curiosity and fascination. An illiberally educated person meets new ideas with fear.

Half the issues they - are so polished they're talking about - are dead by the time they get into the office, and into the midst of their tour where they're really productive.

Well, first of all, I was asked by Ross Perot on a telephone call in March of 1992 if, since he had committed on the Larry King Show to becoming a candidate for president, to get on all 50 ballots

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, F-8 Crusaders.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

I never had a single conversation about politics with Ross Perot in my life; still haven't.

This idea, as you know, that I have firm convictions that the idea of issues being a big deal where our mutual friend went back and he felt so strongly that the determining factor in electoral success should be a proven character.

Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy.

I think character is permanent, and issues are transient.

Leadership must be based on goodwill. Goodwill does not mean posturing and, least of all, pandering to the mob. It means obvious and wholehearted commitment to helping followers.

Do the right thing even if it means dying like a dog when no one's there to see you do it.

Great leaders gain authority by giving it away.

It is in disaster, not success, that the heros and the bums really get sorted out.

On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.

I mean, I didn't - I should have demanded attention of the boss maybe, or something like that that might have backfired. This I would just take as it came.

I'm a grown man. You know, I've been in a lot of scrapes, but I never felt like I got so - there are probably a lot of things I should have done that I didn't do.