Robert McNamara Quotes

We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

Measure what is important, don't make important what you can measure

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.

Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you.

The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.

To this day we seem to act in the world as though we know what's right for everybody.

There are many ways to make the death rate increase.

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.

Brains are like hearts - they go where they are appreciated.

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.

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.

The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.

Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.

We see what we want to believe.

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.

Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme.

General, you don't have a war plan! All you have is a kind of horrible spasm!

[General Curtis] LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

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.

I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?

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.

One cannot fashion a credible deterrent out of an incredible action.

They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations.

The commitment of government to deal with the population issue is of course essential....There are many ways to make the death rate increase.

Belief and seeing are both often wrong.

It would be our policy to use nuclear weapons wherever we felt it necessary to protect our forces and achieve our objectives.

Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused though society.

Action should be founded on contemplation, and those of us who act don't put enough time, don't give enough emphasis, to contemplation.

Rationality will not save us.

I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous

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.

Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.