French Proverb Quotes

Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.

Desperate ills need desperate remedies.

People under siege turn to us in complete frustration and I get a chance to go in when it's do or die.

Desperate affairs require desperate measures.

Our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.

That if desperate times call for desperate measures, then I'm free to act as desperately as I wish.

Desperate times call for desperate analogies.

In difficult and desperate cases, the boldest counsels are the safest.

Well it's a drastic procedure by your standards and mine, but for the people who are living in desperation perhaps the best way to understand it is that it seems no more drastic to them than circumcision.

My position is not designed to win votes. It is designed to address itself to what I think is a problem of crisis proportions. I believe that when you are facing that kind of emergency, you have to be willing to prescribe some pretty tough action.

Nations in great crises and difficulties have often done that which in their prosperous and powerful hour they would not have done.

The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually.

When desperate ills demand a speedy cure, Distrust is cowardice, and prudence folly.

You always have to decide whether an international problem is like a skinned knee or an abscessed tooth. If it’s a skinned knew with a scab and you start messing with the scab you can make it worse. But if you let it alone, it will heal itself. If it is an abscessed tooth, and you leave it alone, it will only fester more and become a bigger problem.

The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

When a government faces an evil that might be avoided, the usual pattern is to first debate whether or not the evil is real or imagined; then determine how evil it really is; then is it an appropriate function of government to avoid it? Then what are the alternative ways to avoid it? Then what are the costs to avoid it? And finally, is the benefit of avoiding the evil worth the cost? In those cases where it is, it is by this time too late to avoid the evil and discussions shift to ameliorating the evil.

The question really is what action we take which lessens the chances of a nuclear exchange, which obviously is the final failure…. You have:, A blockade without any declaration of war A blockade with a declaration of war Strikes One, Two and Three We’ve got invasion

When your house is on fire—that is not the time to talk

The cure can be worse than the illness

We simply have to end this thing. It is out of control.

… problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.

The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities.

When you are confronted with a genuine emergency, then I think you have to look at the interest of the country first.

Analysts can choose the problems that they want to study whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him.

Terrible times require terrible things to be done.