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 with a two by four to get its attention.

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.

It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

It's nice to feel that you have a purpose.

I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.'

I like to say I'm not a hero.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

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.

I was lucky enough to lead a very successful war.

I get angry at a principle, not a person.

Good generalship is the realisation that you've got to figure out how to accomplish your mission with the minimum loss of human life.

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. I'd like to think I'm a caring human being.

All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can't do anything about it... Then you understand the horror of war.

I've managed to convince my wife that somewhere in the Bible it says, 'Man cannot have too many shotguns and fishing poles.'

I can't even begin to visualize myself as a five-star general... When I think of the people who are five-star generals, I can't even see myself standing in their shadow.

I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.

I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.

For the entire first part of my career, I prided myself on being unflappable even in the most chaotic of circumstances.

Fish are a renewable resource, and one of the problems we've had is people feel obliged to catch the limit, then throw 'em in the garbage can.

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.

The fun of fishing is catching 'em, not killing 'em.

When I fish, I stop thinking about anything else. But truth be told, if you want to declare victories, I can tell you the fish have won a lot more than I have. It's interesting that something with a brain the size of a fish's can outsmart us humans, who think we are el supremo.

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.

I can stand in a crystal stream without another human around me and cast all day long, and if I never catch a single fish, I can come home and still feel like I had a wonderful time. It's the being there that's important.

Moving into an unoccupied village when there's no opposition, I don't call that a military victory.

This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.

There's no doubt in my mind that whichever commander ordered the blowing up of Kamisiyah did so in following the instructions that he had received.

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.

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

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.

They say the good Lord doesn't charge you for the days you hunt and fish, and I believe that.

I saw Kuwait many times before the war. I remember it as a beautiful place, full of very nice people, and it's a tragedy to see that somebody could set out to deliberately destroy a country the way the Iraqis have.

Generals aren't in the business of commenting on the correctness or incorrectness of the President's decisions. Anybody who thinks he should be able to do that ought to be fired on the spot.

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.

I do not want to be a pawn in a political campaign.

Hey, I'm not a politician. I'm a ham. I love to give speeches.

War's a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can.

Carpet bombing tends to portray something that's totally indiscriminate, you know, en masse without regard to the target.

As young West Point cadets, our motto was 'duty, honor, country.' But it was in the field, from the rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the sands of the Middle East, that I learned that motto's fullest meaning. There I saw gallant young Americans of every race, creed and background fight, and sometimes die, for 'duty, honor, and their country.'

I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker.

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about.

I believe that sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it's fantastic.

To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.