Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Eric Greitens

Defeating a terrorist organization is like fighting a forest fire; there's never a clear moment of victory, and even after you've won, you have to watch carefully.

The mistake that I made was that I was engaged in a consensual relationship with a woman who was not my wife. That is a mistake for which I am very sorry.

I had a great time at Oxford, got a wonderful, wonderful education there.

I am a conservative Republican, but I didn't start out that way. I was raised as a Democrat.

People know if you care about them. How do you show people that you care? By caring for them. By putting their needs first. By sacrificing for them. By serving them. Do that, and you'll build a great team.

Every entrepreneur has to deal with hardship, but if we're tough enough and thoughtful enough, we can find a way to make hard things make us better.

I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results. It means respecting and challenging our citizens, telling them what they need to hear, not simply what they want to hear.

You don't reduce crime by taking away guns from law-abiding citizens.

I was at this dinner for Rhodes Scholars. And we were in the Rhodes mansion, which is this fancy mansion on the Oxford campus. And I remember I looked up in the rotunda, and I saw that etched into the marble were the names of Rhodes Scholars who had left Oxford, and had fought and died in World War II.

It's oftentimes the case that relief workers, people who've been involved in development projects and foreign assistance, have a real understanding of foreign cultures that the military desperately needs if we're going to be able to work effectively.

I first started doing service, actually, as a kid, doing service projects. Later in college, I started doing international humanitarian work that brought me to places like Bosnia, Rwanda.

I believe that you have to live a life that involves both courage and compassion.

I did a lot of humanitarian work before I joined the military.

It's very important for us as a group of Navy SEALs, to make sure that the message that we send to the country is that we're ready to serve any commander in chief, the elected head of the armed forces, that the people of the United States elect. That is our mission, that's our duty, as Navy SEALs.

Part of the attraction of the SEAL teams was the incredible tests that it offered.

I know the pride of carrying our nation's flag abroad - and I have felt the grief of burying too many friends beneath that flag at home.

The more successful Navy SEALs there are, the more glory it reflects on the community and the better it is for our country.

I'm not after anything, I don't want to be part of politics, I don't want to be a part of anything.

The best way to honor the legacy of a person who's passed is to find a way to support the living.

The more I thought about myself, the weaker I got. The more I recognized that I was serving a purpose larger than myself, the stronger I got.

When vets come home from war they are going through a tremendous change in identity. Then the VA, and others, encourage them to view themselves as disabled.

It certainly could be that there are prejudices around. I can only speak to what I have lived, and I have experienced that people have been incredibly welcoming to me as a Jewish Republican.

If you care about people, then you're willing to act not just with compassion, but you're also willing to act with courage.

Both Sheena and I are working parents, and we know how hard it is to balance work and parenting.

As the Obama administration negotiates with the Karzai government and with Pakistan, we may be tempted to make commitments that, in the name of nation-building, restrict our ability to fight terrorists. If we must involve the Afghan government in every night raid, our operations will slow and targets will escape.

Resilience is distinct from mere survival, and more than mere endurance. Resilience is often endurance with direction.

Success means eliminating Al Qaeda's ability to launch terrorist attacks against the United States and our allies.

I don't think that we need to raise tuition on our students. I don't think that our students should be made to pay for the mistakes of our past politicians and the promises they made.

Anyone who is willing to take a bullet for this country, anyone who is willing to serve in uniform, should at the end of their military service be given an opportunity to become an American citizen.

I'm proud to be Jewish.

I'd finished a dissertation, writing about how international humanitarian organizations worked with kids in war zones and then I made this transition from the academic world to officer candidate school and to the SEAL teams. It was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

I'm very confident that God has a way of bringing good from difficulty.

The people who believe in voter intimidation believe that the minute you make a political donation, that you immediately need to turn all your information over to the government.

My parents were both Democrats and I grew up as a Democrat. Basically I was told that the Democrats were the party that cared about people. I liked people and I cared about them, so I was a Democrat.

One of the things that I've found in everything that I've done: People want leaders to create a sense of direction and to lead and to act.

I'm proud that many of Missouri's lawmakers stood strong to protect the lives of the innocent unborn and women's health.

Since Bin Laden's death, many Americans have decided that our job in Afghanistan is done. They see a victory in the counterterrorism campaign, and are tired of the corruption, confusion and dysfunction of the nation-building campaign.

It's only in the act of pushing yourself, challenging yourself to make a contribution to your community, to your family, to your country, that you actually realize your full self, you know?

I think there are a couple of key lessons that come from Judaism that shaped my life. One of them is the idea we have a duty to repair the world, and all of us should play a role in our lives in trying to repair the world and to make the world better for the next generation.

It's really important to have role models, and a lot of the ancients always talked about this. Seneca talked about this, Aristotle talked about this, and in fact, this was my boxing coach's philosophy in college, was that you have to have role models.

I don't think many people want to say to themselves that they've quit. At the same time, we've all failed in our lives, we've all failed at different things in different ways and I think there's a lot to be said about facing that failure squarely.

There is no room for anti-Semitism in the Republican Party, and the leaders need to show that.

So Hell Week is considered to be the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world. It is a week of continuous military training during which most classes sleep for a total of two to five hours over the course of the entire week.

Everyone needs resilience. It's a virtue essential to growth and essential to happiness.

I've never been in politics before, but even in the brief time that I've been running for governor, I've been exposed to some of the worst people I've ever known. Liars, cowards, sociopaths.

God has a way of helping you to move through suffering and actually become stronger.

I was raised to stand up for the little guy, for working families and the middle class.

We've already seen other candidates set up these secretive super PACs where they don't take any responsibility for what they're funding... because that's how the game has always been played. I've been very proud to tell people, 'I'm stepping forward, and you can see every single one of our donors.'

Every generation of Americans who has fought, every generation of Americans who has served, has suffered.

Whenever we love or care for anything in our lives we're willing to respond with care and with compassion, but if something that we love or someone we love is threatened, we're also willing to respond with courage.

When we make these decisions that we're going to commit ourselves to making a difference in the life of one person every single day, what happens is we actually build a whole generation of citizen leaders.

In any leadership, whenever you're facing a tough challenge, find ways to bring people together and get them to serve together.

After four tours of duty as a Navy SEAL officer, I came home from Iraq and watched the VA - the second-biggest bureaucracy in the country - fail my friends. The VA was broken and my friends were suffering. And yet, time and again, the only 'solution' I heard from liberals was to spend more money. It made me angry.

I read Mitch Daniels's book, 'Keeping the Republic,' several times.

People understand the tremendous sacrifices that veterans have made - and they instinctively want to do something for them. And that sometimes leads people to give veterans an excuse: Oh, you didn't show up for work on time. It must be that you have posttraumatic stress disorder. Oh, you're disabled. Don't even try.

Of course fear does not automatically lead to courage. Injury does not necessarily lead to insight. Hardship will not automatically make us better. Pain can break us or make us wiser. Suffering can destroy us or make us stronger. Fear can cripple us, or it can make us more courageous. It is resilience that makes the difference.

The world needs many more humanitarians than it needs warriors, but there can be none of the former without enough of the latter.

I actually think it's very important that the Navy SEAL community stay out of politics.

Ask yourself, how can I learn from the people around me. Often, your mentors are already in your life; you just haven't yet found a way to learn from them.

What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder, 'What's next for me?' and they ask themselves, 'Why did this happen to me?'