Top 40 Oliver North Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An easy life is rarely meaningful and a meaningful life rarely easy.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

3. “Heroes aren’t athletes who set new sports records, or Hollywood actors who make ‘daring’ films or politicians who make bold promises. Heroes are people who place themselves at risk for the benefit of others.”

— Oliver North

4. “The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. Now is the time for war. I cannot wait to say it is now a time for peace.” – MAJ James Brisson, Chaplain, 1-160th SOAR, 19 October 2001, Afghanistan.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

6. “Compassion doesn’t take sides –.”

— Oliver North

7. “President Reagan didn’t always know what he knew.”

— Oliver North

8. “Heros aren’t defined by the way they die but how they live.”

— Oliver North

9. “For better or worse, most people’s lives seem to turn out rather differently from what they had expected.”

— Oliver North

10. “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.”

— Oliver North

11. “I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.”

— Oliver North

12. “Death is never easy when you know the people doing the dying.”

— Oliver North

13. “The good Lord gave me eight grandchildren, and I am convinced that through schools like Desert Christian that we are going to overwhelm the adversaries, not just with bombs and bullets, but with the demonstration of Christian principles.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

16. “I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn’t have to go to that extreme.”

— Oliver North

17. “In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children’s children.”

— Oliver North

18. “Today, only 2 percent of the people know the name of someone serving in uniform. That means 2 percent of your listeners can actually conjure up the image of someone wearing the uniform of the military of the United States.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

20. “SGT Steven C. Ganczewski, a Ranger in editor Chuck Holton’s unit, had been asked by a high-school guidance counselor why a young man with his “potential” would join the Army. “Someone with his potential” – as if selfless service, even to the point of giving one’s life for a cause greater than any one of us – is somehow beneath one’s “potential.” Thankfully, Patrick Henry and George Washington didn’t feel that way in 1775.”

— Oliver North

21. “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.”

— Oliver North

22. “For some, a hero wears a spandex suit and a cape. My heroes wear flak jackets, flight suits, and combat boots.”

— Oliver North

23. “As a Marine officer in combat, I was responsible for the lives and safety of all the Marines who served with me.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

25. “Writers are storytellers. So are readers.”

— Oliver North

26. “I’m like John Wayne. I only play good guys. Describing his cameo role on a TV series.”

— Oliver North

27. “We don’t need a head of state who guts our defenses and draws phony red lines with a pink crayon.”

— Oliver North

28. “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.”

— Oliver North

29. “For a radical Jihadist, this fight is all about dying the right way while killing an infidel. For us, it’s all about living the right way because all the dying necessary was done for us two thousand years ago on a hill called Calvary.”

— Oliver North

30. “Bill Clinton is not my commander-in-chief.”

— Oliver North

31. “It’s one thing to say don’t commit atrocities on the battlefield. It’s another thing to say don’t get caught doing atrocities.”

— Oliver North

32. “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.”

— Oliver North

33. “I would not trade you a billion dollars for the kids I led to combat in Vietnam or in fact any of the Marines that I served with for a quarter of a century.”

— Oliver North

34. “I think capital punishment’s day is done in this country. I don’t think it’s fairly applied.”

— Oliver North

35. “I haven’t, in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order – not one.”

— Oliver North

36. “History and war are cruel pedants. Those who know too little of the former are likely to have too much of the latter.”

— Oliver North

37. “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.”

— Oliver North

38. “The average term length of a member of congress is approaching 15 years, and the average term length of a convicted criminal is less than three. We’ve got that backward.”

— Oliver North

39. “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.”

— Oliver North

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

— Oliver North

41. “God knows, we don’t want prayer.”

— Oliver North