The following is a list of interesting quotes we’ve collected over the years. Feel free to share your favorites with us.
“Interesting things happen along borders – transitions – not in the middle where everything is the same.” Neal Stephenson
“To warn of everything is to warn of nothing.” CIA saying
“Some people say preparation is everything, and for those who never execute, maybe it is.” Eric Haney
“Never assume that the other guy will never do something that you would never do.” -Donald Rumsfeld
“It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.” – Frederick the Great
“If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.” John Galsworthy
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.” – John Le Carre
“There are no facts about the future.” – Thomas Wilson
“He who speaks about the future lies even when he tells the truth.” -Arab proverb
“No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.” – Ian E. Wilson
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.” -Sun Tzu
“The prize goes to the person who sees the future the quickest.” – William Stiritz
“Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.” – Bruce Schneier
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.” – John Gardner
“You don’t come to a conclusion beforehand and then work your way to that conclusion. You see how the thing plays out.” – General Paul Van Riper
“Knowledge isn’t power. The ability to act on knowledge is power.” – Michael Schrage
“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” – William Gibson
“One learns more about a terrorist group by looking at its victims than at its manifestos.” – Walter Laqueur
“I always hear that we have a needle in the haystack problem. I think the challenge is more fundamental in that we don’t know what the needle looks like and often we don’t even know what hay is.” – Matthew Devost
“To not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues.” – Sun Tzu
“The map is not the territory.” -Alfred Korzybski
“When you can’t imagine how things are going to change, that doesn’t mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.” – Bruce Sterling
“There is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” – Clay Shirkey
“We can prevent a shooting war if we take the initiative to win the subversive war.” -William Donovan
“Estimating is what you do when you do not know.” – Sherman Kent
“A little fact will sustain a lot of illusion.” – Eric Ambler
“The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction makes sense.” – Tom Clancy
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.” – John Locke
“There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.” – Malcolm Muggeridge
