Top 40 Jim Mattis Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?”

— Jim Mattis

2. “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

— Jim Mattis

3. “In keeping with George Washington’s approach to leadership, I would listen, learn, and help, then lead.”

— Jim Mattis

4. “The first is competence. Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it.”

— Jim Mattis

5. “You don’t always control your circumstances, but you can always control your response.”

— Jim Mattis

6. “Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.”

— Jim Mattis

7. “Allowing bad processes to stump good people is intolerable.”

— Jim Mattis

8. “If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.”

— Jim Mattis

9. “If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership.”

— Jim Mattis

10. “Wise leadership requires collaboration; otherwise it will lead to failure.”

— Jim Mattis

11. “Without mavericks, we are more likely to find ourselves at the same time dominant and irrelevant, as the enemy steals a march on us. Further, calculated risk taking is elemental to staying at the top of our competitive game.”

— Jim Mattis

12. “Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who – a decade or a thousand decades ago – set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you.”

— Jim Mattis

13. “Living in history builds your own shock absorber, because you’ll learn that there are lots of old solutions to new problems. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate – you can’t coach and you can’t lead.”

— Jim Mattis

14. “Reading sheds light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.”

— Jim Mattis

15. “Leaders at all ranks, but especially at high ranks, must keep in their inner circle people who will unhesitatingly point out when a leader’s personal behavior or decisions are not appropriate.”

— Jim Mattis

16. “If there’s something you don’t want people to see, you ought to reconsider what you’re doing.”

— Jim Mattis

17. “Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you.”

— Jim Mattis

18. “State your flat-ass rules and stick to them. They shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. At the same time, leaven your professional passion with personal humility and compassion for your troops.”

— Jim Mattis

19. “Yet over the course of my career, every time I made a mistake – and I made many – the Marines promoted me. They recognized that those mistakes were part of my tuition and a necessary bridge to learning how to do things right.”

— Jim Mattis

20. “You cannot allow your passion for excellence to destroy your compassion for them as human beings.”

— Jim Mattis

21. “Slowly but surely, we learned there was nothing new under the sun: properly informed, we weren’t victims – we could always create options.”

— Jim Mattis

22. “The Taliban had left their back door open. Memo to young officers: I can appear brilliant if I fight enemy leaders dumber than a bucket of rocks.”

— Jim Mattis

23. “You make mistakes, or life knocks you down; either way, you get up and get on with it. You deal with life. You don’t whine about it. I.”

— Jim Mattis

24. “PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener.”

— Jim Mattis

25. “I’ll tell you what leadership is,” he said. “It’s persuasion and conciliation and education and patience. It’s long, slow, tough work. That’s the only kind of leadership I know.”

— Jim Mattis

26. “But having a plan counts for nothing unless those above you are made confident that you can execute. As the leader, you maintain communications connectivity up, not just down.”

— Jim Mattis

27. “E pluribus unum.”

— Jim Mattis

28. “By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present.”

— Jim Mattis

29. “As Churchill noted, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.” In our age, a lie can get a thousand times around the world before the truth gets its pants on.”

— Jim Mattis

30. “I learned then and I believe now that everyone needs a mentor or to be a mentor – and that no one needs a tyrant. At the same time, there’s no substitute for.”

— Jim Mattis

31. “Today, many senior military officials complain of feeling baffled and shut out by a White House that combines micromanagement with a near total inability to articulate coherent strategic goals.”

— Jim Mattis

32. “Instillation of personal initiative, aggressiveness, and risk-taking doesn’t spring forward spontaneously on the battlefield. It must be cultivated for years and inculcated, even rewarded, in an organization’s culture.”

— Jim Mattis

33. “Never advantage yourself at the expense of your comrades.”

— Jim Mattis

34. “I may not have come up with many new ideas, but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others.”

— Jim Mattis

35. “I was out to win their coequal “ownership” of the mission: it wasn’t my mission; rather from private through general, it was our mission.”

— Jim Mattis

36. “There is also among some civilians the temptation to treat warfare as just another arena of politics, with public indifference giving latitude for the imposition of social choices – conservative or progressive – uninformed by the grim exigencies and atavistic demands of warfare. This can translate into a perceived lack of respect by civilians in a military culture steeped in respect.”

— Jim Mattis

37. “How do you prepare your men for the shock of battle? For one thing, you need to make sure that your training is so hard and varied that it removes complacency and creates muscle memory – instinctive reflexes – within a mind disciplined to identify and react to the unexpected.”

— Jim Mattis

38. “Critics of the military often contend that people join the military because they have no other economic options, but it is more likely the case that most in the military are motivated by some degree of patriotism and a sense of service. Those who do are more likely to possess or seek the traditional virtues normally associated with military service in the public mind: discipline, loyalty, courage, honor, and self-sacrifice.”

— Jim Mattis

39. “It now became even more clear to me why the Marines assign an expanded reading list to everyone promoted to a new rank: that reading gives historical depth that lights the path ahead.”

— Jim Mattis

40. “From Slim to Fulford – both promoted to four-star general – came the same message: at the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success.”

— Jim Mattis

41. “Men who are familiarized to danger meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.”

— Jim Mattis

42. “The perception is widespread in the military that civilians are insensitive to its culture – more than insensitive: intolerant.”

— Jim Mattis

43. “They do identify a large increase in civilian ignorance or apathy about military issues and also in civilian deference to the military on conduct of the wars, which they consider may be connected to decline in trust of civilian leadership.”

— Jim Mattis

44. “By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled, and by doing brave acts, we become brave.”

— Jim Mattis