Will Stockdale Quotes & Sayings

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

Great leaders gain authority by giving it away. — James Stockdale

There was nothing there but black water and American fire power. — James Stockdale

Entitlement and privelege corrupt. — James Stockdale

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. — James Stockdale

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

So the first thing that went on was to decide ... trying to find a time when we could get reprisal raids out. — James Stockdale

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

We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film. — James Stockdale

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

Yet he found an excuse for drunkenness which few men but he could have found. Stockdale (Memoirs, ii. 189) says that he heard Mrs. Williams 'wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves. "I wonder, Madam," replied Johnson, "that you have not penetration enough to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."' [1278] — James Boswell

A properly educated leader, especially when harassed and under pressure, will know from his study of history and the classics that circumstances very much like those he is encountering have occurred from time to time on this earth since the beginning of history. He will avoid the self-indulgent error of seeing himself in a predicament so unprecedented, so unique, as to justify his making an exception to law, custom or morality in favor of himself. The making of such exceptions has been the theme of public life throughout much of our lifetimes. For twenty years, we've been surrounded by gamesmen unable to cope with the wisdom of the ages. They make exceptions to law and custom in favor of themselves because they choose to view ordinary dilemmas as unprecedented crises. — James B. Stockdale

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. — James Stockdale

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

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

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

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. — James Stockdale

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

And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia. — James Stockdale

And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties. — James Stockdale

I think character is permanent, and issues are transient. — James Stockdale

I was tortured fifteen times, that's 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. — James Stockdale

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

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. — James Stockdale

Sybil's my wife, and on the first day of October, that's the first time I knew Ross was going to run. — James Stockdale

Stockdale, a lonely young fellow, who had for weeks felt a great craving for somebody on whom to throw away superfluous interest, and even tenderness, was not sorry to join her ... — Thomas Hardy

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. — James Stockdale

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. — James Stockdale

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 — Epictetus

They were heading out to the middle of the bay - the Gulf - that's another thing that became kind of standard practice, we didn't hurry the destroyers around the beach any more, when it got dark, we'd take 'em out thirty or forty miles out in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf. — James Stockdale

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. — James Stockdale

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. — James Stockdale