Top 40 Norman Schwarzkopf Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

2. “Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

3. “When placed in command, take charge.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

4. “Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

5. “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.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

7. “I believe that forgiving them is god’s function, our job is to arrange the meeting.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

9. “You can’t help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

10. “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

11. “I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

13. “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

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

15. “Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There’s nothing wrong with fear.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

19. “Leadership consists of character and strategy. If you can’t have both, opt for character.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

20. “I get angry at a principle, not a person.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

21. “How do you fight someone who doesn’t care if they get killed? You accommodate them.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

28. “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

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

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

— Norman Schwarzkopf

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “I’d like to think I’m a caring human being.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

37. “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.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

38. “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

39. “An awful lot has been written about my temper.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

40. “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

41. “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

42. “I like to say I’m not a hero.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

43. “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

44. “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

45. “War is a profane thing.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

46. “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

47. “I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

48. “It is God’s job to forgive Osama Bin Laden. It is our job to arrange a face to face meeting.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf

49. “I’m not a politician. I’d make a lousy politician.”

— Norman Schwarzkopf