Top 35 Oliver North Quotes

The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was ‘Remember Pearl Harbor, never again.’ We need to keep that to mind.

In North Korea, grass is a vegetable eaten by the people, and they’ve got nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, something more stringent than what’s been done to North Korea is going to have to work; otherwise, a military strike is the only option.

And so, the youngsters you have today, even though there are far fewer of them – in World War II 16.5 million men and women in uniform, today roughly a million in uniform in spite of the fact that the country is almost twice as large a population as we had in World War II.

I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.

I want to make it clear that I honestly answered every question put to me during the so-called Iran-Contra hearings. But if they didn’t ask me about something, I wasn’t about to reveal things that would put other people in jeopardy.

I think as a rifle platoon and company commander your view is about 1,000 meters in front of you and you hope you can cover that ground and not have to back up and give it up again.

In uniform, I had to make judgments about the best course of action in combat when the only choices were ‘bad’ or ‘worse.’ As a member of the media, I only had to decide how to get the best ‘shot’ – preferably without getting shot.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.

A Commander-in-Chief needs to do two things. One – tell us who the enemy is. And two – say we are fighting to win.

One of the great upsides to a national book tour is the chance to break out of television’s cocoon and interact directly with the American people.

I’m trusting in the Lord and a good lawyer.

The National Security Council’s real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.

And of course there is so much of World War II that is documented that we never have seen.

I never considered myself a fall guy. I know what I did. I know why I did it. I’m not ashamed of it.

We’ve been in the nation-building business since World War I, and especially since WWII. The goal is not a Jeffersonian Democracy in Afghanistan, but a representative government that respects human rights, protects its own people, and is a friend of the West. These are very realistic – and necessary – goals.

The terrorists that we are up against today do not rely upon cell phones and SAT phones and emails. They rely on couriers. You cannot intercept what a courier is telling somebody.

When you’re told to go brief a United States senator on a covert operation, you go do it. And you trust the information isn’t going to leak.

The American people need to tell their member of Congress that we need a strong defense to protect us and to prevent wars. We can’t get away with simply leading from behind and gutting our defenses.

I came here to tell you the truth, the good, the bad and the ugly.

We’ve got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that’s not getting better. It’s getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it’s quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.

I’m a military guy. I’m not a political character.

I don’t think there is another person in America that wants to tell this story as much as I do.

I’m still in touch with a lot people who continue to serve our country well.

God knows, we don’t want prayer.

Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime – may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.

Without any intended hubris, I’ve lead a pretty exciting life. What I’ve tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story.

The United Nations passed so-called sanctions again on North Korea, and they’ve said they ‘will exercise their preemptive right to a nuclear attack.’ I don’t think this ought to be taken kindly.

I was authorized to do everything that I did.

Vladimir Putin is leading a dying country. Vladimir Putin’s regime exports three things: petroleum products – coal, natural gas, and hydrocarbon energy in the form of petroleum. Number two, it exports arms, and, number three, it exports people.

I can remember as a young lieutenant being sent into the DMZ in the divided Vietnam, from North Vietnam.

In World War II, the book you have in front of you, it was said and it is probably true, that there was not a single American who did not know the name of somebody serving in uniform.

Bill Clinton is not my commander-in-chief.

My wife said to me… you never understood what we were going through back home, did you? And I didn’t. And I have to confess that.

I thought using the Ayatollah’s money to support the Nicaraguan resistance was a neat idea.