Targeted Action Quotes

We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his "best" cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his "worst" spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.

Protest is best used when it's part of a strategy that involves escalating tactics that build pressure on targets.

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it.

We'll follow terrorists everywhere. Should we catch them in a shithouse, we'll kill them in a shithouse.

We need to coordinate closely with international partners, right down to tightly-coordinated execution of seizures, searches, and arrests, so that instead of capturing a single criminal, we're taking down an entire enterprise.

I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

In general, every stimulus directs activity. It does not simply excite it or stir it up, but directs it toward an object.

A ballot is like a bullet. You don't throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.

You cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.

We try very quickly to show that we are not at war with the Iraqi people. We're trying to deal with the people who are indeed themselves at war with the Iraqi people.

I trim my opponents to fit my arrows.

At Silicon Valley, I'm extremely sympathetic to the revolutionary response. I not only agree with it emotionally. I agree with it practically. And the only thing I disagree with is, I don't think Donald Trump is that. Trump is blow it up for no good reason at all. You want to actually do revolution with a target, with an idea, with building a new system.

The Tsarnaev brothers, the elder brother made a public call to jihad and the [Barack] Obama administration didn't target it.

At the WTO, it's never a general surgery. It's always a very specific, clinical, precise surgery - and you can't miss the target. If you miss the target, you kill the patient. It's as simple as that.

Focus on doing the right things instead of a bunch of things.

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

How is Marxist-Leninist theory to be linked with the practice of the Chinese revolution? To use a common expression, it is by "shooting the arrow at the target". As the arrow is to the target, so is Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese revolution. Some comrades, however, are "shooting without a target", shooting at random, and such people are liable to harm the revolution.

The war against terrorism should not be used to interfere with an independent, sovereign state. We need to identify concrete terrorist targets and do no harm to civilians.