Fred Ikle Quotes

Wars cost money.

In wars, serious mistakes are made.

War is not popular politically because there is always a cost—a cost in people and a cost in money.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.

War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.

Every war has its demons.

We cannot go on fighting a war for small hills.

The question in my mind then is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many.

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.

War, we are told, shapes character; it resolves the major questions of international politics, consolidates nations, and indeed, constitutes the principal factor in the progress of civilization through its successive stages.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

I do not believe in terrorism, violence, destruction, murder, pre-emption, or War.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

Avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward.

I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.

We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation.

There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

Wars such as those which have occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate.

I'm really interested in how conflicts arise and how they reach points of no return. I'm no pacifist. Sometimes force is necessary. But war is a choice.

The stark and inescapable fact is that today we cannot defend our society by war since total war is total destruction, and if war is used as an instrument of policy, eventually we will have total war.

We cannot be both the world's leading champion of peace and the world's leading supplier of the weapons of war.