Top 40 Dave Grossman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead, anthropologist.”

— Dave Grossman

2. “Pain shared is pain divided, and you are only as sick as your secrets. In a debriefing, you have the opportunity to share those secrets and to share your pain as you come together to help each other through a traumatic event. Those who say that they do not.”

— Dave Grossman

3. “The sense of personal effectiveness and self confidence created by realistic training is as much a stress reducer as when the muscles go on autopilot.”

— Dave Grossman

4. “Despite our wonders and greatness, we are a society that has experienced so much social regression, so much decadence, in so short a period of time, that in many parts of America we have become the kind of place to which civilized countries used to send missionaries. – quoting William Bennett.”

— Dave Grossman

5. “If there was a leader present ordering soldiers to fire, then almost everyone would do so.”

— Dave Grossman

6. “The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.”

— Dave Grossman

7. “The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. – Glenn Gray The Warriors.”

— Dave Grossman

8. “The guy pulling the trigger,” wrote Allen Cole and Chris Bunch, “never suffers as much as the person on the receiving end.” It is the existence of the victim’s pain and loss, echoing forever in the soul of the killer, that is at the heart of his pain.”

— Dave Grossman

9. “If you spend years and years dialing 4-1-1 and never practice 9-1-1, then under stress you are likely to dial 4-1-1.”

— Dave Grossman

10. “After an attack with weapons of mass destruction by a terrorist group or a terrorist nation, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media.”

— Dave Grossman

11. “General James Gavin, the commander of the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, carried an M1 Garand rifle, then the standard American-infantry weapon of World War II. He advised young infantry officers not to carry any equipment that would make them stand out in the eyes of the enemy.”

— Dave Grossman

12. “There are always those people who say something like: “Debriefing? I don’t need no stinking debriefing!” and we believe them. But the debriefing is not necessarily for them; it is for their buddy, partner, spouse and their children.”

— Dave Grossman

13. “Unconscious incompetence. This is the lowest level of mastery. Most American male teenagers are at a level of unconscious incompetence when it comes to driving. They are bad drivers. They don’t know it and usually they refuse to admit it. The.”

— Dave Grossman

14. “The fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species. When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission.”

— Dave Grossman

15. “Stress acclimatization is about measuring precise doses of stress followed by waves of recovery and then repeating these cycles very specifically. There must be time for adaptation to take place and there must be enough training, repeated over time, to help it stick as well as reinforcing the conditioning.”

— Dave Grossman

16. “Napoleon said, “The moment of greatest vulnerability is the instant immediately after victory.”

— Dave Grossman

17. “Ernst Junger agreed that the defender had no moral right to surrender in these circumstances: “the defending force, after driving their bullets into the attacking one at five paces’ distance, must take the consequences. A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill.” During.”

— Dave Grossman

18. “Robert Heinlein once wrote that fulfillment in life involved “loving a good woman and killing a bad man.”

— Dave Grossman

19. “Ted Turner said: “Television violence is the single most significant factor contributing to violence in America.”

— Dave Grossman

20. “Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the “dark beauty of violence,” and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.”

— Dave Grossman

21. “A brave captain is as a root, out of which, as branches, the courage of his soldiers doth spring. – Sir Philip Sidney.”

— Dave Grossman

22. “Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.”

— Dave Grossman

23. “When a training scenario does not go the way you wanted it to, then do it again, but do not ever think you are dead in an exercise.”

— Dave Grossman

24. “There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer.”

— Dave Grossman

25. “As a counselor I have been taught, and I hold it to be a fundamental truth of human nature, that when someone withholds something traumatic it can cause great damage. When.”

— Dave Grossman

26. “Bilateral symmetry can have grave consequences for a police officer in a tense situation where he is holding a pistol on a suspect.”

— Dave Grossman

27. “Every pro ball team on the planet has “lights out” by at least 10 or 11 o’clock the night before a game.”

— Dave Grossman

28. “If a pro ball player stays up the night before a game, playing video games or watching TV, the other players would kick his tail, the coach would fine him, and that nonsense would stop immediately.”

— Dave Grossman

29. “What battles have in common is the human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct of self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage, usually also of faith and sometimes vision. – Sir Herbert Butterfield Man On His Past.”

— Dave Grossman

30. “Carl von Clausewitz warned that “it is to no purpose, it is even against one’s better interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.”

— Dave Grossman

31. “Like the blind men of the proverb, each individual feels a piece of the elephant, and the enormity of what he has found is overwhelming enough to convince each blindly groping observer that he has found the essence of the beast. But the whole beast is far more enormous and vastly more terrifying than society as a whole is prepared to believe.”

— Dave Grossman

32. “We didn’t train giving verbal commands, so they weren’t available to us during high stress situations.”

— Dave Grossman

33. “The triad of methods used to achieve this remarkable increase in killing are desensitization, conditioning, and denial defense mechanisms.”

— Dave Grossman

34. “You will likely hear participants say such things as, “So that’s what you did?” “Oh, I forgot about that.” “So, when you did that, that’s when I did this. Now it makes sense.” Like a jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered with pieces missing, it all begins to come together as everyone adds their one or two pieces.”

— Dave Grossman

35. “Stanford study showed two other interesting side effects when television viewing was eliminated for a semester: A significant decrease in obesity and a decrease in nagging parents for toys.”

— Dave Grossman

36. “Thus, some individuals may skip certain stages, or blend them, or pass through them so fleetingly that they do not even acknowledge their presence.”

— Dave Grossman

37. “Exxon Valdese, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island had one thing in common: They were all industrial accidents that occurred in the middle of the night involving people with sleep management problems. Insufficient sleep is responsible for billions of dollars of industrial accidents.”

— Dave Grossman

38. “The military and the politicians have been the same people for all but the most recent part of human history, and we know that the victor writes the history books.”

— Dave Grossman

39. “I also taught my young charges to use the siren as little as possible, because the sound of it elevates the heart rate, and ultimately the pitch and pace of the voice.”

— Dave Grossman

40. “The fight-or-flight dichotomy is the appropriate set of choices for any creature faced with danger other than that which comes from its own species.”

— Dave Grossman

41. “Douglas MacArthur said it well: “However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.”

— Dave Grossman