Military Quotes - Page 87

I've come to the conclusion that military style weapons really don't have any place in our society. We ought to reinstate the assault weapons ban that served us well for 10 years from 1994 to 2004.

The military mind tends to be conservative, realistic and historical. The civilian mind tends to be liberal, idealistic and Utopian. Journalists, obviously, are civilians, and they tend to distrust, and to suspect, the military's motives.

Every time the Secretary of Defense tries to get a hand on his many intelligence programs, we hear warnings about the dire consequences to liberty. When you look behind those warnings, what you really see is the CIA trying to preserve its perks.

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

Laws are inoperative in war

What is a war criminal? Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and, therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered, and conducted wars, war criminals? War criminals are not confined to the Axis Powers alone. Roosevelt and Churchill are no less war criminals than Hitler and Mussolini. England, America and Russia have all of them got their hands dyed more or less red - not merely Germany and Japan.

The situation of having to belong to a state to which one does not wish is no less onerous if it is the result of an election than if one must endure it as the consequence of a military conquest.

Surely the Department of Defense can and needs to do a better job of training new and existing first responders to respond to sexual assaults occurring in the military.

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.

When our mothers are alive and healthy, they do extraordinary things... like the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who marched in Argentinean plazas, defying the military junta dictatorship and demanding the whereabouts of their abducted children... or the Liberian mothers who faced down civil war armed only with T-shirts and courage.

In fact, the U.S. military has bent over backwards to respect the religious beliefs of some very dangerous fanatics who want to kill us.

Where journalists have gotten themselves in trouble over the last few decades is that their skepticism often extends only to American officials, the U.S. military and Republican politicians.

Normal military trade is undoubtedly part of the normal State-to-State relations.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than seems necessary.

The reality is that the United States military alone cannot be all things to all nations. We will sharpen the application of our resources, better deploy our forces in the world and share our burdens more and more effectively with our partners. And frankly, all our allies need to do the same.

The reason we've always had a civilian in that job [Secretary of Defence] is because we really believe that it is policymakers who ought to control the military and not have the military control the military.

This is still a man's profession, with a lot of men who intellectually and emotionally have not accepted that the military could be women's work.

Governments and the military purport to protect the public from enemies, and if there were no enemies they would have to invent some, for the simple purpose of rationalizing their existence.

President Kennedy was willing to go to war. He was not a coward. The man had been in war and so had Ken O'Donnell. He was ready to protect this nation, but he was not ready for a military solution just because it was being rammed down his throat.

Today the Israeli government continues seizures of Palestinian land for settlements, military incursions into surrounding countries and denial of the right of Palestinians expelled by terror to return. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, is a war criminal who should be in prison, not in office. Israel's own Kahan commission found that Sharon shared responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy.

In war trivial causes produce momentous events.

I saw that publishing all over the world was deeply constrained by self-censorship, economics and political censorship, while the military-industrial complex was growing at a tremendous rate, and the amount of information that it was collecting about all of us vastly exceeded the public imagination.

People who have been made stateless by military occupation are entitled to repatriation, and then the question is to which state, or to what polity or area? Those who have had their goods taken away are entitled to compensation of some kind. These are basic international laws.