Vince Lombardi

A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive, and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.

Vince Lombardi

The difference between a successful man and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

Vince Lombardi

Anything is ours, providing we are willing to pay the price.

Vince Lombardi

If you settle for nothing less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your life.

Vince Lombardi

There is a price you pay for victory.

Vince Lombardi

The quality of any man´s life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence.

Vince Lombardi

Success is paying the price. You´ve got to pay the price to win – to get there, to stay there.

Vince Lombardi

The most important element in the character makeup is mental toughness.

Vince Lombardi

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men´s blood. Make big plans.

Vince Lombardi

We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us. Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall.

Vince Lombardi

Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with the perfectly disciplined will, which refuses to give in. It´s a state of mind – you could call it character in action.

Vince Lombardi

Second place is meaningless. You can´t always be first, but you have to believe you should have been – that you were never beaten – that time just ran out on you.

Vince Lombardi

The will to excel and the will to win, they endure. They are more important than any events that occasion them.

Vince Lombardi

The harder you work, the harder it is to lose.

Vince Lombardi

Success is not never falling, but in getting back up when you fall.

Vince Lombardi

There is only one kind of discipline: perfect discipline. If I do not enforce and motivate discipline, then I am a potential failure in my job.

Vince Lombardi

Winning isn´t everything, it´s the only thing.

Vince Lombardi

The will is character in action.

Vince Lombardi

The succesful man is honest with himself.

Vince Lombardi

The man who succeeds above his fellow man is the one who early in life clearly discerns his objective, and toward that objective he directs all of his powers.

Vince Lombardi

Success rests not only on ability, but upon commitment, loyalty, and pride.

Vince Lombardi

I´ve never been associated with a loser, and I don´t expect to start now.

Vince Lombardi

Success is not a sometime thing – it is an all-time thing.

Vince Lombardi

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Vince Lombardi

If you cheat on the practice field, you´ll cheat in the game. If you cheat in the game, you´ll cheat the rest of your life. I´ll not have it.

Vince Lombardi

Success is to be placed in a position of command, and the doctrine of command can be summed up in one word – leadership. Successful people are leaders, and leadership is the ability to direct people, but more so, to have those people accept it.

Vince Lombardi

I don´t like to use the term gambler´s instinct, but I´m willing to take a chance.

Vince Lombardi

There are occasions when being hard and tough, however, is the easiest way and the kindest way in the long run. We have to be hard sometimes to get the most out of our people, out of ourselves.

Vince Lombardi

Talent is not only a blessing, it is a burden – as the gifted ones will soon find out.

Vince Lombardi

Leadership rests not only on outstanding ability but on commmitment, loyalty, pride, and followers ready to accept guidance.

Vince Lombardi

Some of us will do our jobs well and some of us will not, but we will all be judged by one thing – the result.

Vince Lombardi

In a tolerant society, there is sympathy only for the misfit, maladjusted, criminal, the loser. It is also time to cheer for, to stand up for, the doer, the achiever, to recognize the problems, to recognize the winner.

Vince Lombardi

What we do on some great occasion will probably depend on what we are; and what we are will depend on previous years of self-discipline.

Vince Lombardi

The new leadership is in sacrifice, in self-denial. It is in love. It is fearlessness. It is humility and it is the perfectly disciplined will. This is also the distinction between great and little men.

Vince Lombardi

Leadership is not just one quality, but rather a blend of many qualities; and while no one individual possesses all of the needed talents that go into leadership, each man can develop a combination to make him a leader.

Vince Lombardi

Leaders are made, and contrary to the opinion of many, they are not born… They are made by hard effort, which is the price we must all pay for success.

Vince Lombardi

To be a leader, you must be honest with yourself and know, as a leader, you are like everyone else, only more so.

Vince Lombardi

A good leader must be harder on himself than on anyone else. He must first discipline himself before he can discipline others. A man should not ask others to do things he would not have asked himself to do at one time or another in his life.

Vince Lombardi

You must identify yourself with the group and back them up, even at the risk of displeasing your superiors.

Vince Lombardi

Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time.

Vince Lombardi

I hold it more important to have the players confidence than their affection.

Vince Lombardi

The difference between success and failure is energy.

Vince Lombardi

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

Vince Lombardi

You must believe that the group wants, above all else, for the leaders to have a sense of approval and that once this feeling prevails, production, discipline, and morale will all be high.

Vince Lombardi

Leaders are lonely people and, whether cordial or remote in manner, are destined to maintain a certain distance between themselves and the members of the group.

Vince Lombardi

A leader is judged in terms of what others do to obtain the results that he is placed there to get.

Vince Lombardi

I don´t want to seem ungrateful: I´m awful proud of you guys, really. You´ve done a hell of a job. But sometimes you just disgust me.

Vince Lombardi

I have been wounded but not yet slain. I shall lie here and bleed awhile. Then I shall rise and fight again. The title of champion may from time to time fall to others more than ourselves. But the heart, the spirit, and the soul of champions remain in Green Bay.

Vince Lombardi

The leader must always walk the tightrope between the consent he must win and the control he must exert.

Vince Lombardi

The real glory is in being knocked to your knees and then coming back… …We just have to button up our pride and we will come back.

Vince Lombardi

If a man who is considered a leader is to stay a leader, he must be prepared to adhere to his principles if he is certain, in his own conscience, that he is doing right.

Vince Lombardi

And when all is said and done, the leader must exercise an effective influence upon the people he leads. The degree to which he accomplishes this, I think, depends on the personality of the man: the incandescence of which he is capable, the flame that burns inside him, the magnetism which draws the hearts of other men to him.

Vince Lombardi

We are going to win some games. Do you know why? Because you are going to have confidence in me and my system. By being alert you are going to make fewer mistakes than your opponents.

Vince Lombardi

Each Sunday, after the battle, one group savors victory, the other lives in the bitterness of defeat. Many hurts are a small price. To the losers, no reason is adequate. To the winners, there is 100 percent elation. To the losers, only resolutions and determination.

Vince Lombardi

Winning isn´t everything, but wanting to win is.

Vince Lombardi

A team does not strive to pile up more points or develop a stronger defense or a manufacturer who is not always looking forward to the better product and marketing approach will find that someone else will come up with that better thing.

Vince Lombardi

We will never create a good society, until individual excellence is once more respected and encouraged.

Vince Lombardi

It has been an American zeal to be first in everything we do and to win, and to win, and to win. Today, we have a new ideology: to be homogenous – no grades – no classification – the only line drawn is passing or failing – no hunt for excellence. And you and I both know that this is the easy way, and the prevailing idea today is to take the easy way, that effort and work are unnecessary.

Vince Lombardi

Forget about the cracked rib. You don´t even need it.

Vince Lombardi

Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent´s pressure, and temporary failures.

Vince Lombardi

Love everyone else. Love as one human to another, who just happens to be white or black, rich or poor, enemy or friend.

Vince Lombardi

The love I speak of is loyalty. The love I speak of is team-work, the love one man has for another.

Vince Lombardi

Love is the answer to everything.

Vince Lombardi

You must forget about being cautious, because if you don´t you´re licked before you start. There is nothing to be afraid of as long as you are aggressive and keep going. Keep going and you will win.

Vince Lombardi

You may not be a tackle. You may not be a guard. You may not be a back. But you will be a professional.

Vince Lombardi

Everybody can like somebody´s strengths and somebody´s good looks. But can you like somebody´s weaknesses? Can you accept him for his inabilities? That´s what we have to do. That´s what love is. It´s not just the good thing.

Vince Lombardi

When those tough sport writers asked me what made the Packers click, I said, “Love”. It was the kind that means loyalty, teamwork, respecting the dignity of another – heart power, not hate power.

Vince Lombardi

All learning is trial and error. The negative experiences do not inhibit but rather contribute to the learning process.

Vince Lombardi

In my field we bring every man to think in terms of team effort. We develop a cohesive machine in which the color lines disappear and the various national origins are nonexistent.

Vince Lombardi

It is easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you´re a winner, when you´re number one. What you´ve got to have is faith and discipline when you´re not yet a winner.

Vince Lombardi

We want to perfect ourselves so that we can win with less struggle and increasing ease, but the strange thing is that it´s not easy wins we ostensibly seek but rather the difficult struggles o which we really look forward.

Vince Lombardi

Love is not liking. You do not need to like someone in order to love them.

Vince Lombardi

A man who blittles another – who is not charitable to another, who has no respect for the dignoity of his fellow man, who is not loyal, who speaks ill of another – is not a leader and does not belong in the top-management echelon.

Vince Lombardi

Once you learn to quit, it becomes habit.

Vince Lombardi

If a leader is sensitive to the emotional needs and expectations of others, the attitude toward the leader from the group will be one of confidence fused with affection.

Vince Lombardi

Adversity is the first path to truth. Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is greater.

Vince lombardi

Possessions pamper the mind. Privation trains and strenghtens it.

Vince Lombardi

In football and business, a leader must be honest with himself and the people he is working with. Skilled ignorance is often more powerful than knowledge and honesty – but only temporarily, only for a short time. In the long run the knowledge and honesty will pay off.

Vince Lombardi

Nothing is more venerable than loyalty.

Vince Lombardi

You don´t do what is right once in a while, but all of the time.

Vince Lombardi

Any kind of separatism is bad, in football or anywhere else.

Vince Lombardi

Character keeps on ticking, when the body fails.

Vince Lombardi

Simplicity is the sign of true greatness and meekness is the sign of true strength.

Vince Lombardi

Each of us must be prepared to adhere to his principles, if he is certain in his own conscience that he is doing right, if he is getting the job done to his satisfaction and to the approbation of the various publics he serves. He must develop a thick skin to criticism and let the caustic comments he receives from some quarters pass over his head.

Vince Lombardi

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising everytime we fall.

Vince Lombardi

Character, rather than education, is a man´s greatest need to safeguard, because character is higher than the intellect.

Vince Lombardi

Success is based upon a spiritual quality – the power to inspire others for good or for evil. Evil may temporarily succeed, but it always keeps within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

Vince Lombardi

The great hope of society is the individual character. If you would create something, you must be something.

Vince Lombardi

Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn´t do it for the individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.

Vince Lombardi

What is defeat? Nothing more than education, nothing but the first step to something better. It is defeat that turns the bones to flint and gristle to muscle and makes men incincible and forms those basic natures that are now ascendancy in the world. Do not be afraid of defeat.

Vince Lombardi

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses or the problems of modern society.

Vince Lombardi

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined efforts of each individual.

Vince Lombardi

After the cheers have died down and the stadium is empty, after the headlines have been written and after you are back in the quiet of your own room, the enduring things that are left are the dedication to excellence, the dedication to victory, and the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.

Vince Lombardi

Work and sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness, and respect for authority are the price that each one must pay to to achieve any goal that is wortwhile.

Vince Lombardi

The mature person puts first things first. I do not mean he is a sad sack. He knows how to live and laugh, to love fun.

Vince Lombardi

All right gentlemen, shall we arrange all of the stupid questions in any priority, or shall we take them all together?

Vince Lombardi to reporters at a press conference

What it takes to be No. 1
You´ve got to pay the price.

Winning is not a sometime thing, it´s an all-the-time thing. You don´t win once in a while, you don´t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game and that is first place. I have finished second twice in my time at Green Bay and I don´t ever want to finish second again. There is a second place bowl game, but it is a game for losers played by losers. It is and always has been an American zeal to be first in anything we do and to win and to win and to win.

Every time a football player goes out to ply his trade he´s got to play from the ground up- from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That´s OK. You´ve got to be smart to be No.1 in any business. But more important, you´ve got to play with your heart- with every fiber of your body. If you´re lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he´s never going to come off the field second. 

Running a football team is no different from running any other kind of organization- an army, a political party, a business. The principles are the same. The object is to win- to beat the other guy. Maybe that sounds hard or cruel. I don´t think it is.

It is a reality of life that men are competitive and the most competitive games draw the most competitive men. That´s why they´re there- to compete. They know the rules and the objectives when they get in the game. The objective is to win- fairly, squarely, decently, by the rules- but to win.

And in truth, I´ve never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn´t appreciate the grind, the discipline. There is something in good men that really yearns for, needs, discipline and the harsh reality of head-to-head combat.

I don´t say these things because I believe in the “brute” nature of man or that men must be brutalized to be combative. I believe in God, and I believe in human decency. But I firmly believe that  any man´s finest hour- his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear- is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle- victorious.

Vince Lombardi

What you see here
What you say here
What you hear here
Let it stay here
When you leave here

Handwritten sign by Vince Lombardi posted in the locker room