Quotes from Richard Marcinko

The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.

The Navy's caste system has the reputation of being about as rigid as any in the world. The first thing most Navy officer do when they meet you is look at your hands to see whether or not you're wearing a Naval Academy class ring. If you do, then you're about of the club. If you don't, then you're an untouchable. I was the original untouchable. The only things I wore on my knuckles were scars.

The goddamn Air Force was probably taking a coffee break. That's how they worked—like union bus-drivers—most of the time. Six or seven hours of flight time (not to exceed this or that altitude, of course), and then it was bye-bye for a didy change, a nap, and a cup of cocoa.

Experience had taught me that warthogs who tough it out are better in combat than your natural gazelles.

We were in the process of gearing up for some new business ventures in Eastern Europe, and I was more than a little interested in finding out about what the new crop of recruits looked like. But before I could ask for a detailed report, Rogue Manor's early-warning radar began sounding an intruder alert.

we were all driven by something that pushed us further than others dared to go. We were mission oriented and would do what we had to do to achieve it.

By the time I left Phnom Penh I could have written a Cambodian cookbook called 50 Ways to Wok Your Dog.

philosophical tenet basic to SEALdom. That concept is: if you set your mind on a goal and your spirit is the spirit of a Warrior, the word impossible DOES NOT EXIST.

To me, a Purple Heart is not a badge of honor. To be blunt about it, I've always considered them enemy marksmanship medals and I'm happy not to have ever "won" one.

Now, the challenge is overtly physical during Hell Week—lots of cold, and sleep deprivation, and exhausting exercise in the surf and the mud. But physical transmogrifies to mental, when, after Hell Week, those tadpoles who made it through realize that they can do about 1,000 percent more than they thought they could. They are beginning to think like Warriors.

Popularity is not leadership.

Conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. Conventional wisdom is taking somebody else's word for the way things are It's the followers of this world who rely on assumption. Not the leaders.

What drives me? In every mission I'm on, the thing that drives me most is the desire to find my limits-and extend them.

There is only one kind of failure I cannot tolerate: the failure to risk failure.