Best 50 quotes of Norman Schwarzkopf on MyQuotes

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

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

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

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that.

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.

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.

Choose to win Get mad, then get over it.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 the United States and the United Kingdom gone on alone to capture Baghdad, under the provisions of the Geneva and Hague conventions we would have been considered occupying powers and therefore would have been responsible for all the costs of maintaining or restoring government, education and other services for the people of Iraq.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.

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

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

War is a profane thing.

Well, unfortunately, I have always regretted the fact that I have a temper, but I also have, you know, have great love and respect for all of the people that have worked for me. I think like everything else, this is one of those things that has been blown out of proportion.

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.

What people don't understand is this is something that we only have in America. There is no other country in the world where the ordinary citizen can go out and enjoy hunting and fishing. There's no other nation in the world where that happens. And it's very much a part of our heritage.

When placed in command, take charge.

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.'

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

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.

I will confess to you that, you know, one of the statements that’s been attributed to me that I’m sort of proud of is somebody said, you know, “What do we do about Osama bin Laden?” And they asked me, “Can we forgive him?” And I said, “Forgiveness is up to God. I just hope we hurry up the meeting.” And that’s the way I feel about him, really. [8 February 2003 show of Meet The Press, NBC News]