Norman Schwarzkopf Quotations

I do not want to be a pawn in a political campaign.

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

Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'

For the entire first part of my career, I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.

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

The fun of fishing is catching 'em, not killing 'em.

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.

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.

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.

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

As young West Point cadets, our motto was 'duty, honor, country.' But it was in the field, from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the sands of the Middle East, that I learned that motto's fullest meaning. There I saw gallant young Americans of every race, creed and background fight, and sometimes die, for 'duty, honor, and their country.'

All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I'm not a type-B personality who knows I have a cancer growing inside of me and can live with the knowledge. I go into a kung-fu attack position when I go through the door of a hospital.

A great deal of the capability of an army is its dedication to its cause and its will to fight. You can have the best equipment in the world, you can have the largest numbers in the world, but, if you're not dedicated to your cause, if you don't have the will to fight, then, you are not going to have a very good army.

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.

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.

I can stand in a crystal stream without another human around me and cast all day long, and if I never catch a single fish, I can come home and still feel like I had a wonderful time. It's the being there that's important.

Good generalship is the realisation that you've got to figure out how to accomplish your mission with the minimum loss of human life.

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.

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.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.

Tanks being deployed far forward is an indication of offensive action; tanks in depth is an indication of defensive action.

The Patriot missile is a point defence missile. Point defence means that you put the missile at a location to defend a very specific target such as an airfield, a supply dump or a headquarters.

I get angry at a principle, not a person.

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

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.

I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.

When the Normandy Invasion was planned, a very specific strategic objective was given, and that strategic objective was the basis upon which the plan for the Normandy Invasion was derived.

I've managed to convince my wife that somewhere in the Bible it says, 'Man cannot have too many shotguns and fishing poles.'

There's no doubt in my mind that whichever commander ordered the blowing up of Kamisiyah did so in following the instructions that he had received.

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.

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.

Unfortunately, if you've ever been in southern Georgia on the beaches in a lightning storm, if you're out there, you're in great, great danger, and you can be killed very, very quickly.

I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker.

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

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

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

He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man.

It's nice to feel that you have a purpose.

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

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.

Fish are a renewable resource, and one of the problems we've had is people feel obliged to catch the limit, then throw 'em in the garbage can.

Nobody can ever pin you down when you speculate.

When I fish, I stop thinking about anything else. But truth be told, if you want to declare victories, I can tell you the fish have won a lot more than I have. It's interesting that something with a brain the size of a fish's can outsmart us humans, who think we are el supremo.

I can't even begin to visualize myself as a five-star general... When I think of the people who are five-star generals, I can't even see myself standing in their shadow.

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.

Moving into an unoccupied village when there's no opposition, I don't call that a military victory.

I'm not proud of killing, of being responsible for the death of a single person. I never will be.

I like to say I'm not a hero.

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

They say the good Lord doesn't charge you for the days you hunt and fish, and I believe that.

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.

Hey, I'm not a politician. I'm a ham. I love to give speeches.

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

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.

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.

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.

Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.

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.

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.

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.

We knew they had them, ... We had some very definite locations, particularly the production facilities... As far as the front-line ammo depot and where they might and might not have been located, we didn't know, and therefore we assumed every single one of them had chemical weapons.

Of course, none of them was going to get shot at. None of them would have to answer to the mothers and fathers of dead soldiers and Marines.

... Recalling back to Operation Desert Storm, I can't help asking myself: Wouldn't it be great for our armed forces and for America if we could have another commander-in-chief named George Bush with Dick Cheney on his team?

The day we executed the air campaign, I said, "we gotcha!

truly the best thing America has to offer the world.

There is nothing in those logs at all about chemical contamination of my troops,

So the alarms went off all the time over there. When they did, we put our troops in protective gear and then we sent in our most sophisticated equipment.

You need that U.N. inspection team in there on the ground. They're the people that can find it and ferret it out,

They didn't want to go to war, they didn't want to leave their families, but when their country asked them to, they did, because they thought it was the right thing to do,

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.'

There were no reports, absolutely none, zero, ... I would have loved to have announced that we found huge caches of chemical weapons.

The Navy's battle force in the last eight years has been cut by one third. And the Air Force reports that it is now called on to mount four times as many operations with a force that has been cut by 40 percent,

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?

War is a profane thing.

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.

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.'

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Choose to win Get mad, then get over it.

Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.

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.

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.

When placed in command, take charge.

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

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.

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