Robert McNamara Quotes

42 quotes in 698 categories

• It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
• That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the…
• To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
• One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God's love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative…
• Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure
• Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.
• We see what we want to believe.
• In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
• All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He…
• One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.
• There are many ways to make the death rate increase.
• What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
• Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.
• Belief and seeing are both often wrong,
• The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
• Short of nuclear war itself, population growth is the gravest issue the world faces. If we do not act, the problem will be solved by…
• ...but highly placed sources within the Kennedy Administration disagreed: "[T]he assumption that the strategic nuclear balance mattered in any way was wrong... As far as…
• Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
• It is true that at the time [1962] we had a strategic nuclear force of approximately five thousand warheads compared to the Soviet's three hundred.
• Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of…

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