War is unpredictable, and flexibility is key to survival.

You win battles by focusing on the mission and ensuring your people are motivated.

Leaders must recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their teams.

To lead, you must believe in your mission and your people.

In the military, you learn that failure is not an option.

Success is a team effort, and no one achieves greatness alone.

The best leaders are those who can inspire people to work together toward a common goal.

You can’t be a good leader without being a good follower first.

In any organization, the most important person is the one who can solve problems.

Don’t wait for the perfect moment; create the moment.

You can never be afraid to make tough decisions.

Real leadership is about empowering others to lead.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

There’s no such thing as a perfect plan, but there are ways to make any plan work.

The most important thing a leader can do is listen.

Victory is achieved not by what you have, but by what you do with what you have.

The key to success is to stay focused on your goals.

You can’t achieve anything alone; success is a team effort.

To be a successful leader, you have to have a clear sense of purpose.

I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

We do not fight to kill; we fight to survive.

War is a terrible thing, but sometimes it’s the only way to achieve peace.

If you’re not learning from your mistakes, you’re not growing.

War is a profane thing.

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.

Success in life depends on making the right decisions at the right time.

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.

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

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

Character, competence, and commitment are the three pillars of effective leadership.

True leaders are not afraid to delegate. They know that it is only by empowering others and trusting them that great achievements can be made.

Leadership is not about titles; it’s about impact, influence, and inspiration.

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.

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.

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 greatest leaders are those who serve others.

You must have a vision, and you must communicate that vision clearly to others.

Good generalship is a realization that… you’ve got to try and figure out how to accomplish your mission with a minimum loss of human life.

The power of a self-fulfilling prophecy is that it can change the course of your life.

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.

A leader’s job is to create an environment where people can succeed.

Success is measured by how you treat people, not by how much you accomplish.

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.’

Winning is nice if you don’t lose your integrity in the process.

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

The difference between a good and great leader is that the great leader doesn’t give up.

You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.

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

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.

The strength of a nation lies in the character of its people.

The only way to lead is by example.

Good leadership is about helping people grow and develop, not just giving orders.

I can’t say enough about the two Marine divisions. If I use words like ‘brilliant,’ it would really be an under description of the absolutely superb job that they did in breaching the so-called ‘impenetrable barrier.’ It was a classic- absolutely classic- military breaching of a very very tough minefield, barbed wire, fire trenches-type barrier.

Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into excellence.

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.

To be a good leader, you have to be willing to accept responsibility.

There’s no substitute for hard work and preparation.

Particularly when you’re dealing with very high ranking people, you know, you have to get their attention, they are used to, by their rank, of having their own way and doing their own thing and when it’s necessary to all work together on something, sometimes you have to hit the mule between the eyes of the two by four to get its attention.

The soldier who fights to preserve his own life is a coward. The soldier who fights for his country, for the freedom of all, is a true hero.

I get angry at a principle, not a person.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

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

I would rather have a simple plan that works than a complicated one that fails.

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.

True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.

A leader is someone who can see the future, know what’s coming, and lead people toward that future.

The most important thing in any military operation is to achieve the objective with the minimum loss of life.

The greatest leaders are not necessarily the ones who do the greatest things. They are the ones who inspire others to do great things.

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?

I hate war. Absolutely, I hate war.

I believe that you should not give up on your goals or dreams just because things get difficult.

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.

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.

A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others.

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

The way to win is to make it simple for people to follow you.

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

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

In the end, what matters most is how well did you live, how well did you love, how well did you learn to let go.

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

There’s no secret to success. It’s all about hard work, preparation, and learning from mistakes.

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

Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.

Leadership is a privilege to better the lives of others. It is not an opportunity to satisfy personal greed.

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.

You don’t know what a person is made of until you put them under pressure.

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.

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

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

When placed in command, take charge.

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

In a recent interview, General Norman Schwartzkof was asked if he thought there was room for forgiveness toward the people who have harboured and abetted the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America. His answer…”I believe that forgiving them is God’s function. Our job is simply to arrange the meeting.

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

Success is sweet, but the secret is sweat.

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