Top 160 Vince Lombardi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I derived my strength from daily mass and communion.”

— Vince Lombardi

102. “Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness, and respect for authority are the price each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.”

— Vince Lombardi

103. “Before I can embrace freedom, I should be aware of what duties I have.”

— Vince Lombardi

104. “The man who wins, is the man who thinks he can.”

— Vince Lombardi

105. “Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all of the needed talents that go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader.”

— Vince Lombardi

106. “The Green Bay Packers never lost a football game. They just ran out of time.”

— Vince Lombardi

107. “The challenge of every team is to build a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another because the question is usually not how well each person performs, but how well they work together.”

— Vince Lombardi

108. “If you cheat yourself in practice, you’ll cheat yourself in a game; and if you cheat in a game, you’ll cheat yourself for the rest of your life.”

— Vince Lombardi

109. “Mental toughness is a state of mind – you could call it ‘character in action.’”

— Vince Lombardi

110. “The joy is in creating, not maintaining.”

— Vince Lombardi

111. “Champions make their own luck.”

— Vince Lombardi

112. “We win our games in practice. We learn and follow the fundamentals of our game better than anyone in the league. All of our games are won in practice.”

— Vince Lombardi

113. “I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.”

— Vince Lombardi

114. “If you really want something, you can have it if you’re willing to pay the price. And the price means you have to work better and harder than the next guy.”

— Vince Lombardi

115. “Football isn’t a contact sport; it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport...”

— Vince Lombardi

116. “The best game plan in the world never blocked or tackled anybody.”

— Vince Lombardi

117. “If you get into the endzone, act as if you’ve been there before.”

— Vince Lombardi

118. “I think good physical conditioning is essential to any occupation. A man who is physically fit performs better at any job. Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”

— Vince Lombardi

119. “I will demand a commitment to excellence and to victory, and that is what life is all about.”

— Vince Lombardi

120. “Success rests not only on ability, but upon commitment, loyalty, and pride.”

— Vince Lombardi

121. “It is essential to understand that battles are primarily won in the hearts of men.”

— Vince Lombardi

122. “A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall.”

— Vince Lombardi

123. “In order to succeed, this group will need a singleness of purpose, they will need a dedication, and they will have to convince all of their prospects of the willingness to sacrifice.”

— Vince Lombardi

124. “When you travel with the team and you eat with the team – you eat what the team eats.”

— Vince Lombardi

125. “Football is like life – it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.”

— Vince Lombardi

126. “We don’t pray to win. We pray to play the best we can, and to keep us free from injury. And the prayer we say after the game is one of thanksgiving.”

— Vince Lombardi

127. “There is only one kind of discipline, and that is the perfect discipline. As a leader, you must enforce and maintain that discipline; otherwise, you will fail at your job.”

— Vince Lombardi

128. “To achieve success, whatever the job we have, we must pay a price.”

— Vince Lombardi

129. “The leader can never close the gap between himself and the group. If he does, he is no longer what he must be. He must walk a tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.”

— Vince Lombardi

130. “A disciplined person is the one who follows the will of the one who gives the orders.”

— Vince Lombardi

131. “We know how rough the road will be, how heavy here the load will be, we know about the barricades that wait along the track, but we have set our soul ahead upon a certain goal ahead and nothing left from hell to sky shall ever turn us back.”

— Vince Lombardi

132. “If a man is running down the street with everything you own, you won’t let him get away. That’s tackling.”

— Vince Lombardi

133. “If you give me anything less than your best, you’re not only cheating yourself. your coaches, your teamates, everybody in Green Bay, and everything pro football stands for. Your also cheating the Maker who gave you the talent.”

— Vince Lombardi

134. “Second place is meaningless. You can’t always be first, but you have to believe that you should have been – that you were never beaten – that time just ran out on you.”

— Vince Lombardi

135. “The objective is to win: fairly, squarely, decently, win by the rules, but still win.”

— Vince Lombardi

136. “When you are through trying to improve, you are through.”

— Vince Lombardi

137. “One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be the dominating thought in one’s mind.”

— Vince Lombardi

138. “While statistics are interesting, they’re all in the past.”

— Vince Lombardi

139. “If you can’t get emotional about what you believe in your heart, you’re in the wrong business.”

— Vince Lombardi

140. “One’s desire, not ability, determines success.”

— Vince Lombardi

141. “There is something good in men that really yearn for discipline.”

— Vince Lombardi

142. “A team that thinks it’s going to lose is going to lose.”

— Vince Lombardi

143. “Some people try to find things in this game that don’t exist but football is only two things – blocking and tackling.”

— Vince Lombardi

144. “Having the capacity to lead is not enough. The leader must be willing to use it.”

— Vince Lombardi

145. “At many a moment on many a day, I am convinced that pro football must be a game for madmen, and I must be one of them.”

— Vince Lombardi

146. “Many more things would be accomplished if we didn’t consider them impossible.”

— Vince Lombardi

147. “No leader, however great, can long continue unless he wins battles. The battle decides all.”

— Vince Lombardi

148. “In a game like football, where you have very little time to decide what you are going to do, you have to react almost instinctively, naturally.”

— Vince Lombardi

149. “A good executive goes around with a worried look on his assistants.”

— Vince Lombardi

150. “The pursuit of perfection may be impossible, but if we chase perfection, we just might catch excellence.”

— Vince Lombardi