Top 80 Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes
#1. Going to war without France is like going hunting without an accordion.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#2. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#3. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#4. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#7. I'm not proud of killing, of being responsible for the death of a single person. I never will be.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#8. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#9. Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'
Norman Schwarzkopf
#10. I believe that forgiving them is god's function, our job is to arrange the meeting.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#11. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#12. Good generalship is the realisation that you've got to figure out how to accomplish your mission with the minimum loss of human life.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#13. If Saddam were to be replaced tomorrow he would probably be replaced with someone who's just as bad or worse than he is.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#14. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#17. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#18. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#20. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#21. I've managed to convince my wife that somewhere in the Bible it says, 'Man cannot have too many shotguns and fishing poles.'
Norman Schwarzkopf
#22. I do hunt, and I do fish, and I don't apologize to anybody for hunting and fishing.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#24. 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?
Norman Schwarzkopf
#26. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#28. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#29. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#30. You can't help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#31. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#32. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#33. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#34. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#35. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#36. How do you fight someone who doesn't care if they get killed? You accommodate them.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#37. For the entire first part of my career, I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#38. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#39. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#40. 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.'
Norman Schwarzkopf
#41. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#42. A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#44. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#45. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#46. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#47. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#48. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#50. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#51. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#55. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#56. Moving into an unoccupied village when there's no opposition, I don't call that a military victory.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#57. Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#58. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#59. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#61. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#62. Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#63. Tanks being deployed far forward is an indication of offensive action; tanks in depth is an indication of defensive action.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#64. True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#65. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#67. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#68. Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#70. Leadership consists of character and strategy. If you can't have both, opt for character.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#71. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#72. Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#73. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#74. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#75. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#76. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#77. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#78. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#79. 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.
Norman Schwarzkopf
#80. They say the good Lord doesn't charge you for the days you hunt and fish, and I believe that.
Norman Schwarzkopf
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