James Stockdale Quotations

But there were highs as well as lows, it was as though they said everybody was picking on the man who had more practical real life experiences than the whole batch of them put together.

I was commanding officer of a supersonic fighter squadron, FA Crusaders.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

It just - the whole thing reminded me of a May pole dance. I was standing there trying to figure out how I could get my oar in and never really did.

I mean, I really think that I would expect somebody that's leading the country to have some kind of - some kind of courage physically, personally.

In order to do something you must be something.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

Entitlement and privelege corrupt.

I think character is permanent, and issues are transient.

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

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.

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

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.

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