Everett Dirksen Quotes

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.

The United States is involved in a war in Vietnam. American troops will stay until victory.

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

Naturally our Government would not consent to such terms, and so the war had to proceed.

People who start wars never know exactly how they will turn out.

War is too serious a matter to be entrusted to generals.

The president refuses to say… refuses to say that the objective over there is victory.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

I don't recall anyone who was strongly against except one man, and that was the President [JFK]. The President just didn't want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the President's personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn't go in.

War should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy.

We were reconciled to the fact that we would have war with Russia…. If the war had not come now, we would have had it in two years time under worse conditions…. No one could have foreseen that militarily not everything would work out as one had believed.

We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. But I can't give up a piece of territory as big as South Vietnam and still have the people re-elect me.

Many Europeans are concerned that stronger sanctions are a slippery slope toward war unless the U.S. is at the table.

I was never able to convince myself that there was a cost-free alternative course, as from 1961, or that any of the different strategies since proposed, especially those involving stronger military action, would have made sense.

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

We have always said that in our war with the Arabs we had a secret weapon - no alternative.

I'm sure it is, I'm not for any kind of war, we've been engaged in several wars since the second world war and we lost in Korea, we lost in Vietnam, they are political wars, they have nothing to do with any real threat, nor does this one.

Although I voted against the initial resolution approving the war in Iraq, I have consistently voted to support our troops with much-needed armor and supplies.

Our modern states are preparing for war without even knowing the future enemy.

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

Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.

We were so shocked by how fast that war went that President Bush did not have a plan, a peace plan.

I believe the military should be wary of diplomacy until war is declared; then the State Department should keep its nose out and let the military do whatever is necessary to win.

Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.