Defense War Quotes

#1. In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense.

Sallust

#2. If a war be undertaken ... before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.

Charles Eliot Norton

#3. Bobby Tom told me he's not afraid of the Chargers' defense."
"Bobby Tom'll tell you he's not afraid of nuclear war, so I wouldn't put too much stock in his opinion.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips

#4. The only defensible war is a war of defense.

G.K. Chesterton

#5. In all, the future secretary of defense and wartime vice president[, Dick Cheney,] would receive five deferments during the Vietnam War, protecting him from service during his draft-eligible years.

Charlie Savage

#6. The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.

Ruth Duccini

#7. For those of you who were critical that nobody paid enough attention to the generals at the beginning of the war, has it occurred to you that you don't want to make that mistake at the end of the war?
Secretary Robert Gates

Bob Woodward

#8. It is the lord's duty to his domain to provide adequate defense for his folk during a time of war or crisis.

Terry Mancour

#9. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked.

Sun Tzu

#10. What's it like to be that goofy little soldier, scared stiff, with his bayonet aimed at Christ? What's it like to have been a woman in a defense-plant job during World War II? What's it like to be a kid at the front lines? It's all funny and tragic at the same time

Studs Terkel

#11. It amazes me that we spend 20% of the US budget on defense and far-off wars, and not on fighting cancer, disease, and aging.

Zoltan Istvan

#12. In my world of the people who study war and defense issues, we simply did not talk about robotics. We do not talk about it because it's seen as mere science fiction. It's cold, hard, metallic reality.

Peter Singer

#13. The jelly-bean eating thug says that national defense is important. But national defense starts at home.

Dick Gregory

#14. So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are.

Barack Obama

#15. The moral equation strongly tells everyone who understands freedom, who understands morality, that Israel is engaging in a just war in defense of its people and its freedom.

George Pataki

#16. I'm particularly committed to the political people who needed defense. I understand that they're fighting a bigger war than just, "Let me go get some money for cocaine tonight."

Lynne Stewart

#17. In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!

Jack Kornfield

#18. And we will win the war, and there will be costs. But the military folks understand that, and so do I, and so does the Secretary of Defense.

George W. Bush

#19. In order to assure an adequate national defense, it is necessary - and sufficient - to be in a position in case of war to conquer the command of the air.

Giulio Douhet

#20. Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunder made by their commanders.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#21. No, painting is not interior decoration. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso

#22. To defeat Islamic extremist terrorism, we must put them on defense. If they are at war against us - which they have declared - we must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them.

Rudy Giuliani

#23. The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.

James Madison

#24. In war the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of the offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.

George S. Patton

#25. Defense is the first act of war.

Byron Katie

#26. We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany.

Joseph Stalin

#27. It's not a question of what you want. No sane person ever WANTS a war. But if you see outsiders as a threat and believe that an armed defense is the only way you're going to be safe from them, then you're going to find yourselves in the middle of a war whether you want one or not.

Chris Lester

#28. Arms alone can give the world no permanent peace, no confident security. Arms are solely for defense - to protect from violent assault what we already have. They are only a costly insurance. They cannot add to human progress.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#29. The 'defense' budget is three quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25%. I guarantee you: when war becomes that profitable, we're going to see more of it.

Chalmers Johnson

#30. Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, or those of our Southern brethren.

Isham G. Harris

#31. To summarize: Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket. 1. We must take the profit out of war. 2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war. 3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

Smedley D. Butler

#32. Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant 'whiz kids' tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

Thomas Sowell

#33. A war is never undertaken by the ideal State, except in defense of its honor or its safety.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#34. War for the sake of war is sin, but war for the sake of defense is duty.

Martin Luther

#35. There's no excuse for skimping on national defense when the country is at war.

Bill Nelson

#36. The most cost-effective move we could make in defense spending would be to shift the focus of CIA operations, giving this agency the directive to make trouble for the Soviet Union.

John P. Wheeler III

#37. War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Bill Moyers

#38. Do you remember, during the war, when Porky worked in a defense plant? He and Bugs Bunny. That was a good one too.

Thomas Pynchon

#39. I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history. We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement - that's the kindest word I can give you - of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war.

John McCain

#40. He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall.

Milan Kundera

#41. I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,

Harry Reid

#42. I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

Chuck Schumer

#43. When an invincible weapon deals with an impenetrable defense,
war is useless. The wisest decision is to ceasefire and do synergy.

Toba Beta

#44. We need an adequate defense, but every arms dollar we spend above adequacy has a long-term weakening effect upon the nation and its security.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#45. War of aggression, war which does not imply defense of one's country, is a collective crime.

Carlos Saavedra Lamas

#46. Against naked force the only possible defense is naked force. The aggressor makes the rules for such a war; the defenders have no alternative but matching destruction with more destruction, slaughter with greater slaughter.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#47. It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership.

William Kittredge

#48. Perhaps if Hitler had had the wisdom to withdraw his troops and prepare for the defense of his own country, Germany, despite the loss of face this would entail in the losing of all Italy, then the course of the war, if not the outcome, would have been quite different.

Christopher Vokes

#49. Harry Truman, after all, in conjunction with Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, radically cut back American arms following the end of the Second World War. Johnson himself wished to dismantle the Marine Corps and felt nuclear weapons had made all such conventional arms unnecessary.

Victor Davis Hanson

#50. We have a right to defend ourselves, but we don't have a right to
aggress.

Dennis Kucinich

#51. All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

George Wald

#52. For as long as this nation has known war, we have embraced the heroes it has produced. Americans have rightfully noted the honor and nobility of courage under hostile fire and thanked those who perished in their defense.

James T. Walsh

#53. The Pacific no longer represents menacing avenues of approach for a prospective invader. It assumes, instead, the friendly aspect of a peaceful lake. Our line of defense is a natural one and can be maintained with a minimum of military effort and expense.

Douglas MacArthur

#54. War is just a racket ... I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.

Smedley Butler

#55. Dear sirs,
The cold war isn't over. When national borders fail, the epidermis is the last line of defense. We are counting on you.
Sincerely,
Patriot

Benson Bruno

#56. It is not widely known that, ever since the end of the Korean War, the United States has spent essentially the same amount of money on defense, in real terms, every single year.

James Fallows

#57. [The war on terrorism isn't a religious war, but] a defense of our right to make moral choices, to seek fellowship with God that is chosen and not commanded.

John Ashcroft

#58. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

George Orwell

#59. Applied war is where the money's at. I don't mean that figuratively. Defense is 140% of the UVE budget. Offense is twice that. This is possible because there is no budget for math education.

Zach Weinersmith

#60. Believe me, after the destruction of Chinese nuclear sites by our missiles, there won't be much time for the Americans to choose between the defense of their Chinese allies and peaceful co-existence with us.

Leonid Brezhnev

#61. Any survey of the free world's defense structure cannot fail to impart a feeling of regret that so much of our effort and resources must be devoted to armaments.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#62. Basketball is like war in that offensive weapons are developed first, and it always takes a while for the defense to catch up.

Red Auerbach

#63. Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man.

Jean-Luc Godard

#64. In 1940, then-Senator Harry Truman headed up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. In the course of World War II, more than $15 billion in unnecessary and fraudulent defense spending was identified.

Bernie Sanders

#65. In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogans of "defense" and "emergency," it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace.

Murray N. Rothbard

#66. female soldiers n.
males with female features

During the war in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi government rejected the idea of female soldiers coming to their defense (women make up one-tenth of the U.S. forces), so it designated the women soldiers "males with female features.

William D. Lutz

#67. We've always known that Democrats are anti-war, and we've always known that we can't really count on them when it comes to national defense. But we have finally seen with whom they will go to war: the American people who disagree with them.

Rush Limbaugh

#68. Barron and Paul ... rely on 'specialists' at the State and Defense Departments ... Elsewhere in the media, similiar figures are bandied about, with equal credibility.

Noam Chomsky

#69. Standing on the defensive indicates insufficient strength; attacking, a superabundance of strength.

Sun Tzu

#70. We don't declare war any more; we declare national defense.

Eugene McCarthy

#71. Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#72. A national government using New Deal programs and the massive defense spending beginning with World War II and continuing through the Cold War was Johnson's vehicle for expanding the Southern economy and making it, as he hoped, one of the more prosperous regions of the country.

Robert Dallek

#73. Like the bee, we distill poison from honey for our self-defense
what happens to the bee if it uses its sting is well known.

Dag Hammarskjold

#74. I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant. But this is a war for honor and self-defense. A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people.

Abdullah Ocalan

#75. President Bush's campaign is now attacking John Kerry for throwing away some of his medals to protest the Vietnam War. Bush did not have any medals to throw away, but in his defense he did have all his services records thrown out.

Jay Leno

#76. I don't think you can perpetrate war crimes with defensive weapons, with air defense systems.

Sergei Lavrov

#77. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#78. If we need women in our defense forces, we must not need much defense.

Joseph Sobran

#79. Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack.

Sun Tzu

#80. Always attack. Even in defense, attack. The attacking arm possesses the
initiative and thus commands the action. To attack makes men brave; to defend
makes them timorous.

Steven Pressfield

#81. Wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets.

Adolf Hitler

#82. On the McLaughlin Report, August 26, 1990: 'There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the middle East, the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.

Pat Buchanan

#83. If you support the war on drugs in its present form, then you're only paying lip-service to the defense of freedom, and you don't really grasp the concept of the sovereign individual human being.

Neal Boortz

#84. Most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.

Sarah-Patton Boyle

#85. Among the many interesting objects which will engage your attention that of providing for the common defense will merit particular regard. To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.

George Washington

#86. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders.'

George W. Bush

#87. National Defense is not a threat to peace; it is the guarantee of peace with freedom.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#88. The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor.

Ronald Reagan

#89. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

George Washington

#90. Isn't the best defense always a good attack?

Ovid

#91. [These]were the legitimate acts of self-defense which had been forced upon the Irish people by English aggression... We did not initiate the war, nor were we allowed to choose the battleground.

Michael Collins

#92. The firmest security of peace is the preparation during peace of the defenses of war.

John Quincy Adams

#93. We have put the Cold War behind us. We no longer count our divisions and our warheads. And I am Russia's first civilian defense minister in many centuries. We have become more pragmatic.

Sergei Ivanov

#94. An Atlas, whose back is bowed and whose hands are busy holding up the world, has no arms to lift to deal with his own defense. Increase his burdens and you will crush him ... This is our present posture ... This suggestions I make ... would ... conserve American lives for American ends.

Murray Rothbard

#95. During the Cold War, workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations.

Bobbie Ann Mason