George Lakoff Quotes

The troops are therefore empowered and are in duty bound in this war to use without mitigation even against women and children any means that will lead to success.

The difference between us and the terrorists is that when we kill innocent civilians, we do so by accident. When they kill innocent civilians, they do it deliberately.

For the most part, I think American armies are awfully good in the business of protecting civilians, of not going over the line.

I really believe that carpet-bombing, bombing civilian populations, is a form of terror - it's state terror as opposed to vigilante terrorism.

In other words, United States, our values, the way that we occupy ourselves in terms of saying here's the way we stand in this country when we go to war, it's not that we go in and we kill off anybody, including families. We don't take the riches. We don't claim the women. My God, that's not America.

I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

The last thing we want to do is to go into an area and inflict unnecessary civilian casualties. One is too many.

No, the United States does not target civilians.

It is a rule of international law that weapons and methods of warfare which do not discriminate between combatants and civilians should never be used.

What is and isn't justified by military necessity is, naturally, open to interpretation. One of the key concepts, though, is the law of proportionality. A military attack that results in civilian casualties - 'collateral damage' - is acceptable as long as the military benefits outweigh the price that is paid by humanity.

The only moral question with suicide bombing is who the target is. And in that sense, the suicide bomber is no different from the stealth bomber or the cruise missile. If it is targeted at civilian people, then it is morally wrong, whether done by Bush, Blair, or a suicide bomber.

The Islamic method of waging war is not to kill innocent civilians, but it was Christians in World War II who bombed innocent civilians in Dresden and dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, neither of which were military targets.

According to the laws of war, a warring party can just walk away from civilian harm that they have caused.

What about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Were there not innocent civilians there? We are simply taking the rules of engagement that you have invented and turning them back against you.

Where are the gains for religious freedom and human rights to justify all the bombings, invasions and wars we have conducted in the lands from Libya to Pakistan - to justify the losses we have endured and the death and suffering we have inflicted?

You don't torture people. You don't indiscriminately attack civilians. You protect as good as you can the impact of your warfare on women and children.

I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.

Hamas hides among unwitting civilians, who have no way of controlling its activities. This fact does not give Israel the right to kill innocent non-combatants, not even unintentionally. Besides, murder is not "unintentional" when you know it is inevitable.

The history of warfare has not yet enabled any army, any civilized army, the army of a democracy like Israel, to be able to deal with a ruthless terrorist enemy that uses civilians as a human shield without having some incidental civilian casualties.

The American people and the American military will never get used to civilian casualties. And we will - we will fight against that every way we can possibly bring our intelligence and our tactics to bear. We're not the perfect guys, but we are the good guys.

I did not feel very patriotic. I did not feel proud of our country, seeing that we were bombing peasant villages, that we were not just hitting military targets, that children were being killed. We were terrorizing the North Vietnamese with our enormous Air Force. They had no Air Force at all. They were a little pitiful country and we were terrorizing them with our bombs. And no, I did not feel proud at all.

We killed 6 innocent people, launching 22, I think $3 million apiece missiles on Baghdad...that's a little bit overdoing it.

Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending ... among women and children," . "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don't think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men.

Israel does not target civilians. It targets the terrorists.

The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.