Top 38 Robert McNamara Quotes
#1. 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 busy men living frightened, fragmented lives of quiet desperation.
Robert McNamara
#2. Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.
Robert McNamara
#3. Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure
Robert McNamara
#4. Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.
Robert McNamara
#5. At my age, 85, I'm at age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions. My rule has been try to learn, try to understand what happened. Develop the lessons and pass them on.
Robert McNamara
#8. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
Robert McNamara
#9. One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.
Robert McNamara
#10. It was a perfectly beautiful night, as fall nights are in Washington. I walked out of the president's Oval Office, and as I walked out, I thought I might never live to see another Saturday night.
Robert McNamara
#11. 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 famine, riots, insurrection and war.
Robert McNamara
#12. General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!
Robert McNamara
#13. 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 public.
Robert McNamara
#14. I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
Robert McNamara
#15. It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.
Robert McNamara
#16. 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.
Robert McNamara
#17. One must take draconian measures of demographic reduction against the will of the populations. Reducing the birth rate has proved to be impossible or insufficient. One must therefore increase the mortality rate. How? By natural means. Famine and sickness
Robert McNamara
#18. 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 nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not.
Robert McNamara
#20. There is no more important task in a democracy than resolving the differences among people and finding a course of action that will be supported by a sufficient number to permit the nation to achieve a better life for all.
Robert McNamara
#21. Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.
Robert McNamara
#22. To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.
Robert McNamara
#23. The greatest contribution Vietnam is making-right or wrong is beside the point-is that it is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.
Robert McNamara
#24. I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous
Robert McNamara
#25. The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
Robert McNamara
#26. Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.
Robert McNamara
#28. I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.
Robert McNamara
#29. If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.
Robert McNamara
#30. The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.
Robert McNamara
#31. I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?
Robert McNamara
#32. A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
Robert McNamara
#33. We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo - men, women and children. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Robert McNamara
#34. All those involved in the firebombing of Tokyo .. were war criminals interviews recorded in the movie The Fog of War.. the firebombing of Tokyo occurred before the atom bombs.. 100,000 civilians died in one night from American bombs.. 500,000 altogether over several days say some.
Robert McNamara
#35. Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.
Robert McNamara
#36. They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.
Robert McNamara
#37. I don't object to its being called "McNamara's war." I think it is a very important war and I am pleased to be identified with it and do whatever I can to win it.
Robert McNamara
#38. Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.
Robert McNamara
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