Herman Kahn Quotes

37 quotes in 620 categories

• I'm against fashionable thinking.
• Authority is not power; that's coercion. Authority is not knowledge; that's persuasion, or seduction. Authority is simply that the author has the right to make…
• I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.
• A surprising number of government committees will make important decisions on fundamental matters with less attention than each individual would give to buying a suit.
• A healthy and fully functioning society must allocate its resources among a variety of competing interests, all of which are more or less valid but…
• Anything that reduces war-related destruction should not be considered altogether immoral.
• As for total disarmament, there are almost 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today; even if they were banned, not all would be destroyed.
• Clearly, the first task is to gain acceptance of a more reasonable view of the future, one that opens possibilities rather than forecloses them.
• Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision.
• Deterrence itself is not a preeminent value; the primary values are safety and morality.
• For if enough people were really convinced that growth should be halted, and if they acted on that conviction, then billions of others might be…
• For some years I have spent my time on exactly these questions - both in thinking about ways to prevent war, and in thinking about…
• Human and moral factors must always be considered. They must never be missing from policies and from public discussion.
• Hopefully, nations will refuse to accept a situation in which nuclear accidents actually do occur, and, if at all possible, they will do something to…
• I am against the whole cliche of the moment.
• In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of…
• In a world which is armed to its teeth with nuclear weapons, every quarrel or difference of opinion may lead to violence of a kind…
• It is immoral from almost any point of view to refuse to defend yourself and others from very grave and terrible threats, even as there…
• Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion.
• Nevertheless, during the sixty years of the twentieth century many problems have come increasingly into the realm of acceptable public discussion.

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