Marine Corps Quotes

We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn’t teach me.

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.

The highly skilled workers at Lima have enabled the plant to grow far beyond its original mission, now providing a wide variety of cutting-edge military vehicles and equipment to the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren’t any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

My job was to make sure the base entrances were secure, that people entering were scanned and cleared, and that people within the bases were safe and abiding by the rules set forth by the Marine Corps.

When you get out of the Marine Corps, you feel like you can do anything.

Intelligence work in the Marine Corps proved to me the strategic value in establishing a Central Command to act as a clearinghouse for disparate bits and floating bytes of information.

My first direct encounter with the military was when I joined ROTC as a graduate student, although my father, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, can trace the military service in our family all the way back to the Revolutionary War.

I wouldn’t want to go back over my life. I’ve done it all. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the Marine Corps. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the war. I wouldn’t have missed college. Or playin’ for the Colts. I got all the money I need. Five children. I got a truck. I have no regrets whatsoever.

Emphasis in the Marine Corps isn’t on talking about your feelings.

My definition, the definition that I’ve always believed in, is that esprit de corps means love for one’s own military legion – in my case, the United States Marine Corps. It means more than self-preservation, religion, or patriotism. I’ve also learned that this loyalty to one’s corps travels both ways: up and down.

I loved being in the Marine Corps, I loved my job in the Marine Corps, and I loved the people I served with. It’s one of the best things I’ve had a chance to do.

Being in the Marine Corps and doing the job I did, there is a lot of risk involved. It made me comfortable with risk.

I have drawn inspiration from the Marine Corps, the Jewish struggle in Palestine and Israel, and the Irish.

I fought as an infantry Marine on one of the Vietnam War’s harshest battlefields. After leaving the Marine Corps, I studied law and found a fulfilling career as an author and journalist. But again and again, I came back to the personal fulfillment that can only come from public service.

In the Marine Corps, everything had a purpose.

In 2007, I was given the humbling privilege of being made an honorary member of the United States Marine Corps in recognition of my visits to troops during the Iraq War.

The Army was always big on Clausewitz, the Prussian; the Navy on Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American; and the Air Force on Giulio Douhet, the Italian. But the Marine Corps has always been more Eastern-oriented. I am much more comfortable with Sun-tzu and his approach to warfare.

One of the things I learned at the Naval Academy and the Marine Corps is we have to make tough decisions.

I’m probably more comfortable inside a Marine Corps rifle company than I am anywhere in my life.

When I came back, I tried to live independently. In the Marine Corps, we’re taught as a team, so why would you think you’re going to get out of the military and live independently and not rely on your support system around you?

I have endless admiration for people like Chrissie Hynde who’ve been out as the only girl in a band. I’m not sure that, even as a little Marine Corps brat, I would’ve been able to deal with that.

In the Marine Corps there is no individual effort, we’re all a big team.

I liked the military life. They teach you self-sufficiency early on. I always say that I learned most of what I know about leadership in the Marine Corps. Certain basic principles stay with you – sometimes consciously, mostly unconsciously.

My brother was a captain in the Marine Corps and a very big hero in my life.

In the Marine Corps, we’re taught to put America above ourselves.

The Marine Corps has to ask itself, ‘What does our nation need from its premier crisis response force?’ We are America’s shock troops in war and peace. I know it sounds corny, but it’s not.

Well, you sort of get out of the pool room, you get out of the Marine Corps, you get out and read some literature, you become involved with people who also want to know and are ready to share some ideas about literature and thoughts, and it becomes nourished that way.

I got a bad conduct discharge, was at home for a few months in late ’99, and basically said, ‘Dad, I want to give wrestling a shot. I sure as hell don’t wanna go to college, and the Marine Corps wasn’t for me. And I need to make some money, so let’s see if I can do it.’

I was going to be a Marine before I was going to be an actor. I was really serious about joining the Marine Corps.

I always equate wrestling to having been in the Marine Corps.

After my time in the Marine Corps with ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ I didn’t want to hide any more.

We also very importantly recommend continued growth in the Army and the Marine Corps end strength.

Everything in my life I owe to God, my family, the Naval Academy, and the Marine Corps.

One of the first things I learned in the Marine Corps is that any military mission has to be defined as precisely as you can possibly define it, and then you size the force and equipment force to accomplish that mission without fail.

In the Marine Corps, you meet this really broad segment of the country; you’re working with people from all kinds of backgrounds. And it exposes you to the American military, particularly the American military at war.

I am a retired United States Marine Corporal and I started out in 2nd Battalion Night Marines on my deployment and I finished my career in the Marine Corps at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as a patient.

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.

When I was sworn in the Marine Corps in 1964, when I was sworn into Congress, I swore to uphold the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. We have a lot of domestic enemies of – of the Constitution, those who want to pervert it, those who want to change it.

The Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.

My grandpa was a World War II paratrooper, my uncle a Vietnam Purple Heart recipient, my cousins both Marine Corps officers. I have some very close Navy SEAL connections as well.

In the Marine Corps, I was used to people doing what they said and saying what they mean. There was a higher purpose and calling in the Corps. Everyone works toward accomplishing something together, and there’s a common goal. In entertainment, the same isn’t always true. You’re in it for yourself in Hollywood.

I’m not scared of very much. I’ve been hit by lightning and been in the Marine Corps for four years.

So the Marine Corps really did teach me to conquer fear, and then to go for higher causes, higher purposes.

Clay Hunt was the kind of individual that has made America a great country. In 2005, when his country needed him, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. Shot in Iraq, he earned a Purple Heart, and after he recuperated, he graduated from Marine Corps Scout Sniper School and was deployed to Afghanistan.

My dad was a golden gloves boxer in the Marine Corps, then a deputy sheriff. My mom worked as an office assistant.

When I got out of the Marine Corps, I didn’t have much guidance.

Our mom was a super strident, capable, and strong individual. I think because she was a military wife in the Marine Corps, she had to push back the things that she believed, and she had to really scrape and fight to have her space.

The Marine Corps has been, and will continue to be, America’s Expeditionary Force in Readiness – ready to respond to today’s crisis, with today’s Marine forces, today.

You have to be forward-moving and able to balance a lot of things at the same time. I attribute a lot of that to the Marine Corps and Juilliard both.

I follow the teachings of Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, United States Marine Corps. He won two Congressional Medals of Honor, and he wrote the highly controversial antiwar book ‘War is a Racket.’

When I joined the Marine Corps, you have to do a vocational test to get in, and I took the test, they were like, ‘You did great. You can do anything you want to do.’ I said, ‘OK, I want to do this.’ ‘Except for that because you’re a woman.’

I served two tours in Iraq, in the Marine Corps.

I’m a conservative because I believe in peace – real peace, not just the peace of mind. I’m a conservative because we understand that real peace comes from the Marine Corps, not the Peace Corps.

When I was 10, I had a paper route. One year, I delivered my papers through a hurricane. My mother was against the idea, but my dad, who was a sergeant in the Marine Corps, overruled her. I was determined to deliver my papers.

We have a saying in the Marine Corps and that is ‘no better friend, no worse enemy, than a U.S. Marine.’ We always hope for the first, friendship, but are certainly more than ready for the second.

At Juilliard, suddenly I was reading these great plays that could articulate the ways I was feeling in the Marine Corps, and that felt very therapeutic, by putting words to feelings, in a big way.

The Marine Corps was the first father figure I had ever known.

The POW camps of North Vietnam were packed with Air Force and Naval Academy graduates. The six midshipmen in my Naval Academy class of 1968 who served as liaisons between the Marine Corps and the Brigade of Midshipmen later suffered nine Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and one man killed in action.

In the Marine Corps, your buddy is not only your classmate or fellow officer, but he is also the Marine under your command. If you don’t prepare yourself to properly train him, lead him, and support him on the battlefield, then you’re going to let him down. That is unforgivable in the Marine Corps.