Norman Schwarzkopf
I'm not proud of killing, of being responsible for the death of a single person. I never will be.
I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.
Generals aren't in the business of commenting on the correctness or incorrectness of the President's decisions. Anybody who thinks he should be able to do that ought to be fired on the spot.
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.
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 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.
Good generalship is the realisation that you've got to figure out how to accomplish your mission with the minimum loss of human life.
I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.
I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.
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.
In a recent interview, General Norman Schwartzkof was asked if he thought there was room for forgiveness toward the people who have harboured and abetted the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America. His answer..."I believe that forgiving them is God's function. Our job is simply to arrange the meeting.Collection: Forgiveness
I admire men of character and I judge character not by how men deal with their superiors, but mostly how they deal with their subordinates. And that, to me, is where you find out what the character of a man is.Collection: Character
How do you fight someone who doesn't care if they get killed? You accommodate them.Collection: Fighting
Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.Collection: Character
Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good.Collection: Thinking
I believe that forgiving them is god's function, our job is to arrange the meeting.Collection: Jobs
You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.Collection: Relationship
Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.Collection: Sweet
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?Collection: Sometimes
Leadership consists of character and strategy. If you can't have both, opt for character.Collection: Character
It is God's job to forgive Osama Bin Laden. It is our job to arrange a face to face meeting.Collection: Jobs
I have seen competent leaders who stood in front of a platoon and all they saw was a platoon. But great leaders stand in front of a platoon and see it as 44 individuals, each of whom has aspirations, each of who wants to live, each of whom wants to do good.Collection: Leadership
Particularly when you're dealing with very high ranking people, you know, you have to get their attention, they are used to, by their rank, of having their own way and doing their own thing and when it's necessary to all work together on something, sometimes you have to hit the mule between the eyes of the two by four to get its attention.Collection: Eye
I don't consider myself dovish and I certainly don't consider myself hawkish. Maybe I would describe myself as owlishthat is wise enough to understand that you want to do everything possible to avoid war.Collection: Wise
Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear.Collection: Fear
I can't say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I use words like 'brilliant,' it would really be an under description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called 'impenetrable barrier.' It was a classic- absolutely classic- military breaching of a very very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Judging
From the time I was twelve years old until I retired last year at the age of fifty-seven, the Army was my life. I loved commanding soldiers and being around people who had made a serious commitment to serve their country.Collection: Love
More than 200 ships from 13 nations conducted over 10,000 flawless intercepts, which formed a steel wall around the waters leading to Iraq. And these operations continue today. Thanks to these superb efferts not one cargo hold, not one crate, not even one pallet of seaborne contraband even touched Saddam Hussein's shores. The result: Iraq lost 90% of its imports, 100% of its exports, and had its gross national product cut in half.Collection: Wall
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 sideCollection: Giving
I am quite confident that in the foreseeable future armed conflict will not take the form of huge land armies facing each other across extended battle lines, as they did in World War I and World War II or, for that matter, as they would have if NATO had faced the Warsaw Pact on the field of battle.Collection: Military
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.Collection: Fall
I like to say I'm not a hero. I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.Collection: Hero
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.Collection: Veterans Day