Top 40 Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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 was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

War is a profane thing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I like to say I’m not a hero.

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

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

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