It is imperative to contest all factions for complete victory, so the army is not garrisoned and the profit can be total. This is the law of strategic siege. — Sun Tzu
If I wish to engage, then the enemy, for all his high ramparts and deep moat, cannot avoid engagement; I attack that which he is obliged to rescue. — Sun Tzu
Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight. If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve. — Sun Tzu
Begin by seizing something which your opponent holds dear; then he will be amenable to your will. — Sun Tzu
There are five options in war: fight, defend, flee, surrender, or die. You have proven inept at the first two, and now have the temerity to surrender. Death is all you deserve! — Sima Yi
When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard. — Sun Tzu
One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas. — Victor Hugo
Seize the outpost K5 with your knight, and you can go to sleep. Checkmate will come by itself. — Savielly Tartakower
Short Siege Quotes
To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry. — Mahmoud Darwish
Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege. — Yehuda Amichai
The skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting. — Sun Tzu
To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power. — Frank Herbert
I'm currently working on a Mind Siege for youth. — Tim LaHaye
Fame is like a suffocating castle sieged by the enemy. — Mehmet Murat Ildan
How can you lay siege to a whole country? Who is really under siege now? Baghdad cannot be besieged. — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons. — Joe Queenan
We remain essentially a nation under siege. — Theodore C. Sorensen
Die wahren Siege sind die Stillen. — Hermann Maier
Under Siege Quotes
Exactly when people are in turmoil is the time that the entertainment business has always been at its best. Because people don't want to be reminded every day that they are under siege, or that they're not having a great time of life. — Lionel Richie
If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk. — Gary Ackerman
Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts florish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any expirienced in a town when it is under siege. — Voltaire
Cultural America is under siege. And as the Soviet experience illustrates, ideology is a weak glue to hold together people otherwise lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural sources of community. — Samuel P. Huntington
For generations, the body of Christ has been defeated and put under a constant siege of condemnation from the accuser because they believe wrongly that the Holy Spirit convicts believers of their sins. — Joseph Prince
They [muslims] are chopping off heads in Syria. Christianity is under siege. I'm Protestant, Presbyterian, and I'm proud of it. Other religions frankly are banding together, we need to band together. — Donald Trump
This old notion that work is drudgery is nonsense. Most days, even back when Xerox was under siege, I could not wait to get to the office. — Ursula Burns
Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles. — Maureen Dowd
You're comin' with me, you gotta be invisible. You walk by a hatch and you see the enemy, you become the hatch. — J. F. Lawton
This boa, the American columns, are being besieged between Basra and other towns north, west, south and west of Basra. The Americans are the people who are under siege. — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Besieged Quotes
The fact is that as soon as they reach Baghdad gates, we will besiege them and slaughter them. — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Marriage is like a besieged castle; those who are on the outside wish to get in; and those who are on the inside wish to get out. — Arabic Proverbs
By flatterers besieged And so obliging that he ne'er obliged. — Alexander Pope
At every point I am besieged by people who would like me to conform to some social norm of whatever sort of social group they expect me to be a part of. I never have any identification with these social groups. — Sean Parker
Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans, the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field, and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities. — Sun Tzu
There are routes not to be followed, armies not to be attacked, citadels not to be besieged, territory not to be fought over. — Sun Tzu
The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor. — Edwin Hubbell Chapin
We conservatives bemoan the decline in values that has besieged our society. Why then should we not abhor the lack of morality involved in discharging untested chemicals into the air, ground, and water to alter and harm, to whatever degree, human life and wildlife? As a conservative, I do abhor it. — Wendell Berry
September 11, 2001: Citizens of the U.S., besieged by terror’s sting, rose up, weeping glory, as if on eagles’ wings.--from the poem Angel of Remembrance: Candles for September 11, 2001 — Aberjhani
To me, the work I do is a means of interpreting unsettling truths, of bearing witness, and of sounding an alarm. The beauty of formal representation both carries an affirmation of life and subversively brings us face to face with news from our besieged world. — Richard Misrach
Lay siege to your sins, and starve them out by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life. — Richard Baxter
In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day. — Napoleon Bonaparte
It’s okay to be discouraged. It’s not okay to quit. To know you want to quit but to plant your feet and keep inching closer until you take the impenetrable fortress you’ve decided to lay siege to in your own life—that’s persistence. — Ryan Holiday
My name is Alexei Yuri Gagarin Siege of Stalingrad Glorious Five Year Plan Sputnik Tractor Moscow Dynamo Back Four Balowski. Me Dad was a bit of a Communist, know what I mean? — Alexei Sayle
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. — Virginia Woolf
There are people starving in the siege, there are children traumatized and terrified. There are men women and children dying. This is a situation that has reached the proportions of a tremendous humanitarian crisis. It is a tragedy and every minute that passes we lose lives and more people are brutalized and traumatized. — Hanan Ashrawi
Ah, whither shall a maiden flee, When a bold youth so swift pursues, And siege of tenderest courtesy, With hope perseverant, still renews! — Coventry Patmore
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world. — William Styron
Since 9/11 we've been engaged in wars around the world, and General [James] Mattis has been a leading battlefield commander in many of those theaters, including in the April 2004 siege of Fallujah, where the US Marines killed so many people that the municipal soccer stadium in the city had to be turned into a graveyard for the dead. — James Mattis
I shall last a year, and but little longer: we must think to do good work in that year. Four things are laid upon me: to drive out the English; to bring you to be crowned and anointed at Reims; to rescue the Duke of Orléans from the hands of the English; and to raise the siege of Orléans. — Joan of Arc
To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack. — Samuel Johnson
It is not the desire of new acquisitions, but the glory of conquests, that fires the soldier's breast; as indeed the town is seldom worth much, when it has suffered the devastations of a siege. — Samuel Johnson
Prayer is the human response to the perpetual outpouring of love by which God lays siege to every soul. — Richard J. Foster
Singapore could only be taken after a siege by an army of at least 50,000 men. It is not considered possible that the Japanese would embark on such a mad enterprise. — Winston Churchill
He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. — Sun Tzu
"Bolshoi Babylon" is the work of filmmakers Mark Franchetti and Nicholas Read. Franchetti has been a Moscow-based journalist for 18 years. He won a British Press Award for his coverage of the 2002 Moscow theater siege in which 130 hostages were killed. He's covered Russian politics and the war in Ukraine. — Elizabeth Blair Lee
The Encyclopedia - the advance artillery of reason, the armada of philosophy, the siege engine of the enlightenment. — Peter Prange
From the U.S. point of view, negotiations are, in effect, a way for Israel to continue its policies of systematically taking over whatever it wants in the West Bank, maintaining the brutal siege on Gaza, separating Gaza from the West Bank and, of course, occupying the Syrian Golan heights, all with full U.S. support. — Noam Chomsky
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune. — William Shakespeare
Out on the street I start to run; I need to breathe in this life, the trees, the warmth of my town. I will be able to control my own fate and I will know how to be happy. Happiness is something you lay siege to, it is a battle . . . — Shan Sa
Laying siege to enemy-controlled cities allows attacking armies to keep their own casualties low by avoiding urban combat. — Walid Muallem
Some women are to be captured by storm and some taken by siege; yet if there be not a traitor in her heart that shall deliver up the garrison, thou shalt not prevail over her. — Gelett Burgess
We live in the shadow of crime with the unspoken understanding that we are victims.. of fear, of violence, of social impotence. A man has risen to show us that the power is, ans always has been, in our hands. We are under siege. He's showing us that we can resist. — Frank Miller
For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.' — Steven Pinker
According to other writers, it is the women who last longest in sieges, the young men who soonest fall into that deadly lethargy that precedes actual death. But the account is accurate enough: that is what a siege is like. Moreover, that is what it is meant to be like. When a city is encircled and deprived of food, it is not the expectation of the attackers that the garrison will hold out until individual soldiers... drop dead in the streets. The death of ordinary inhabitants of the city is expected to force the hand of the civilian or military leadership. The goal is surrender; the means is not the defeat of the enemy army, but the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead. — Michael Walzer
Therefore the skilful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field. — Sun Tzu
In Conclusion
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