Target Selection Quotes

You shouldn't shoot at every opportunity that passes by.

When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive.

Be careful what you shoot at . . . most things in here don't react too well to bullets.

Terrorism is a decentralized phenomenon - in its funding, planning, and execution.

I don't believe we are, because I believe that just as 9/11 was an attack on a very populous area, terrorism also looks to see where you can go and where you're not expected.

Who shall I shoot? You choose. Now, listen very carefully: where's your coffee? You've got coffee, haven't you? C'mon, everyone's got coffee! Spill the beans!

You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.

I just try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way.

When you're facing an opponent over a broad front, you don't aim for the opponent's strong points, important though they may be. Pick a little outpost that you can capture and win. And then you find another place that you can capture and win it, and then you move slowly toward the big places.

The fact is, I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security. I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us. What, for example, would our targets be? It is impossible to conceive of a target that could be hit without large-scale destruction of many innocent people?

The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Nowadays, with much more racial and ethnic mixing, we are seeing serial killers murdering a variety of victims; whoever comes along will most likely do.

The idea of a terrorist attack that assaults innocent human beings in a building, or a mall or a restaurant is bad enough--yet the terrorist mind that looks at a passenger plane and sees the fuel and the intensity of the blast, and sees the rocket engines that will carry it into the heart of destruction like a cruise missile, but who does not see the humanity of one single soul on that airplane is the chilling truth of what we're up against.

My knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy's cheek, so, too, in war. You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your target and go in.

I see myself as a roving mosquito, choosing it's target.

It's very difficult to score in this city (Washington DC), so pick your targets and hit 'em.

In planning an attack, persons have various roles.

Sure we have smart bombs that can blow up any target in the world, but we don’t know which ones to blow up.

We are looking for targets that have a tremendous strategic fit for the company. The colleges must have complementary education programs, have an excellent reputation, long operating history and solid regulatory compliance.

We fight smart, fight intelligent, pick our shots, be very smart about how we place our feet. That's how we win.

Where I get involved is that I have to sign off the money, yet when you have target one, two or three from your process I feel fine going after the No 1 target and, if it's not to be him, then number two or three.

A huntress never stabbed anything she didn't want to.

Did either the nonexistent or the measured response after a series of attacks on Americans the past decade - in Lebanon, Africa, Saudi Arabia, New York, and Yemen - suggest to our terrorist enemies that it was wrong and unwise to kill reasonable and affable people, or did the easy killing imply that self-absorbed and pampered Lotus-eaters would not much care who or how many were butchered as long as it was within reasonable numbers and spread out over time?

If envy were the cause of terrorism, Beverly Hills [and] Fifth Avenue ... would have become targets long ago.

It would be useless to bomb Washington. If you destroy one building, they already have two other buildings completely staffed with people doing exactly the same thing.