Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

How do you fight someone who doesn't care if they get killed? You accommodate them.

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.

Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.

True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is.

I believe that forgiving them is god's function, our job is to arrange the meeting.

You learn far more from negative leadership than from positive leadership. Because you learn how not to do it. And, therefore, you learn how to do it.

You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.

Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good.

Any soldier worth his salt should be antiwar. And still there are things worth fighting for.

Leadership consists of character and strategy. If you can't have both, opt for character.

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.

Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.

When placed in command, take charge.

To be an effective leader, you have to have a manipulative streak - you have to figure out the people working for you and give each tasks that will take advantage of his strength.

A very great man once said you should love your enemies and that's not a bad piece of advice. We can love them but, by God, that doesn't mean we're not going to fight them.

I do hunt, and I do fish, and I don't apologize to anybody for hunting and fishing.

It is God's job to forgive Osama Bin Laden. It is our job to arrange a face to face meeting.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

I get angry at a principle, not a person.

What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind.

Judge your enemy based upon capabilities, not intent, you have to look at the enemy and really almost make a worst case call every time.

Choose to win Get mad, then get over it.

I am living proof that if you catch prostate cancer early, it can be reduced to a temporary inconvenience, and you can go back to a normal life.

I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.

Good generalship is a realization that... you've got to try and figure out how to accomplish your mission with a minimum loss of human life.

If it had been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed.

I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

But I would defy anyone to go back over the years and tell me anyone whose career I've ruined, anyone whom I've driven out of the service, anyone I've fired from a job.

With a chemical alarm, you're going to build one that is oversensitive because you would rather the alarm go off and give you a false alarm than to err on the other side

It's the sense of duty that keeps you going sometimes when things get very, very rough. Somebody's got to do it. And if you don't, who will?

I may have made my reputation as a general in the Army and I'm very proud of that. But I've always felt that I was more than one-dimensional.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

Had we taken all of Iraq, we would have been like a dinosaur in the tar pit - we would still be there, and we, not the United Nations, would be bearing the costs of that occupation.

I'm not a politician. I'd make a lousy politician.

If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.

First of all, Saddam did not win the war, even though he says he did, I mean, you know, that's a joke and everybody in the world knows it.

Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear.

I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.

I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.

You can't help but... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'

If we invade Iraq and the regime is very close to falling, I'm very, very concerned that the Iraqis will, in fact, use weapons of mass destruction.

War is a profane thing.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about.

This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.