Quotes from Oliver North

The lesson of Pearl Harbor ought never to be forgotten, and of course the motto that came from that, 69 years ago, the war which my dad fought, was 'Remember Pearl Harbor, never again.' We need to keep that to mind.

There's the assumption being made by the national security advisers to the Obama administration that the North Korean leadership is not suicidal, that they know they will be obliterated if they attacked the United States. But I would point that everything in South Korea and Japan is well within range of what they might want to do.

The American people need to tell their member of Congress that we need a strong defense to protect us and to prevent wars. We can't get away with simply leading from behind and gutting our defenses.

I would have promised those terrorists a trip to Disneyland if it would have gotten the hostages released. I thank God they were satisfied with the missiles and we didn't have to go to that extreme.

I'm trusting in the Lord and a good lawyer.

I think as a rifle platoon and company commander your view is about 1,000 meters in front of you and you hope you can cover that ground and not have to back up and give it up again.

Bill Clinton is not my commander-in-chief.

A Commander-in-Chief needs to do two things. One - tell us who the enemy is. And two - say we are fighting to win.

It's one thing to say don't commit atrocities on the battlefield. It's another thing to say don't get caught doing atrocities.

In North Korea, grass is a vegetable eaten by the people, and they've got nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, something more stringent than what's been done to North Korea is going to have to work; otherwise, a military strike is the only option.

Today, only 2 percent of the people know the name of someone serving in uniform. That means 2 percent of your listeners can actually conjure up the image of someone wearing the uniform of the military of the United States.

What's been happening in Iraq, what young Americans wearing flak jackets, helmets and flight suits have done is... created the circumstances under which Iraq can become our closest ally in that part of the world and still have a representative government. And that's going to be a very good thing considering what's going on in that neighborhood.

President Reagan didn't always know what he knew.

Without any intended hubris, I've lead a pretty exciting life. What I've tried to do in Mission Compromised is draw on those experiences to create a sense of excitement and realism within the story

I never considered myself a fall guy. I know what I did. I know why I did it. I'm not ashamed of it.

The terrorists that we are up against today do not rely upon cell phones and SAT phones and emails. They rely on couriers. You cannot intercept what a courier is telling somebody.

Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime - may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.

In World War II, the book you have in front of you, it was said and it is probably true, that there was not a single American who did not know the name of somebody serving in uniform.

We've got a very difficult situation created by this embrace of the so-called Arab Spring. And that's not getting better. It's getting worse. The carnage for the people of Syria is horrific, and it's quite frankly too little, too late to reverse a lot of that.

I'm still in touch with a lot people who continue to serve our country well.

One of the great upsides to a national book tour is the chance to break out of television's cocoon and interact directly with the American people.

All of my high school male teachers were WWII and/or Korean War veterans. They taught my brothers and me the value of service to our country and reinforced what our dad had shown us about the meaning of service.

We've been in the nation-building business since World War I, and especially since WWII. The goal is not a Jeffersonian Democracy in Afghanistan, but a representative government that respects human rights, protects its own people, and is a friend of the West. These are very realistic - and necessary - goals.

I came here to tell you the truth, the good, the bad and the ugly.