Robert McNamara Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“I want to say, and this is very important: at the end we lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war. We came that close to nuclear war at the end. Rational individuals: Kennedy was rational; Khrushchev was rational; Castro was rational. Rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. And that danger exists today.”
-- Robert McNamara

#War #Luck #Important
“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

#Children #Winning #Men
“There are many ways to make the death rate increase.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Way #Increase #Rate
“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

#War #Thinking #Criminals
“What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
-- Robert McNamara

#Winning #Immoral
“We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Shapes #Given #Foreign Policy
“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

#Giving #Enough Time #Action
“General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!”
-- Robert McNamara

#Peace #War #Kind
“Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Wish #Answers
“Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.”
-- Robert McNamara

#United States #Sanity #Should
“I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?”
-- Robert McNamara

#Thinking #Race #Evil
“They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Mistake #Weapons #Nuclear
“Let's go in, let's totally destroy Cuba.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Cuba
“It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Nuclear #Use #Weapons
“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

#Loss #Tests #Vietnam
“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

#War #Issues #Growth
“The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Weapons #Nuclear #Destruction
“Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure”
-- Robert McNamara

#Business #Important #Management
“We see what we want to believe.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Believe #Want
“In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil”
-- Robert McNamara

#Order #Evil #May
“All the evidence of history suggests that man is indeed a rational animal, but with a near infinite capacity for folly. . . . He draws blueprints for Utopia, but never quite gets it built. In the end he plugs away obstinately with the only building material really ever at hand--his own part comic, part tragic, part cussed, but part glorious nature.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Animal #Men #Hands
“One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Fashion #Action #Incredibles
“Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Leadership #Broken Heart #Brain
“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

#War #Patriotic #President
“Belief and seeing are both often wrong,”
-- Robert McNamara

#Belief
“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

#Country #War #Night
“Engagement is the conscious inhabitation of your body and mind. Practice is happening when your open awareness is moving with, in and through your embodied activity. Intrinsic to practice is your conscious participation with your life. Engagement is the conduction of your free and open awareness through your activities, whatever they may be.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Philosophy #Moving #Practice
“I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous”
-- Robert McNamara

#Inspirational #Weapons #Nuclear
“Rationality will not save us.”
-- Robert McNamara

#Thinking #Rationality
“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

#War #Age #Trying

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