Eric Greitens Quotes
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Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.
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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.
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I had a great time at Oxford, got a wonderful, wonderful education there.
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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.
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I was worried that all the corners of the earth had been explored, all the great battles fought. The famous people on TV were athletes and actresses and singers. What did they stand for? I wondered: Had the time for heroes passed?
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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?
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When I was in Iraq and Afghanistan, I never once turned to someone before a raid on a house and said, 'Hey, man, are you a Democrat or a Republican?'
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In any leadership, whenever you're facing a tough challenge, find ways to bring people together and get them to serve together.
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Part of the attraction of the SEAL teams was the incredible tests that it offered.
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One of the great things about the SEAL teams in particular, and the American military in general, is the tremendous diversity of backgrounds and experience that people bring to their service.
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Both Sheena and I are working parents, and we know how hard it is to balance work and parenting.
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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.
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The best definition I have ever heard of a vocation is that it's the place where your great joy meets the world's great need. We need all of you to find your vocation. To develop your joys, your passions, and to match them to the world's great needs.
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In Missouri, we built the steamships that plied the Mississippi. It was people of Missouri who believed that a human being could fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. And it was Missourians who built the capsule in which an American first orbited the earth.
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We have a culture of political corruption in Jefferson City. We have corrupt politicians, well-paid lobbyists and special-interest insiders taking the state in the wrong direction.
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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.
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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.
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Like the plague, opioids kill the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, the virtuous and the sinful.
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If people can live through genocide and retain compassion, if they can take strength in pain, if they are able, still, to laugh, then certainly we can learn something from them.
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Every generation of Americans who has fought, every generation of Americans who has served, has suffered.
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We are not going to use money from the people of the state of Missouri for what I believe is corporate welfare. We've got far too many core priorities of government that have to be invested in.
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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.
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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.
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God has a way of helping you to move through suffering and actually become stronger.