Dick Cheney Quotes

The United States is the preeminent arms pusher worldwide.

The U.S. is by far the biggest exporter of arms in the world. It was true during the Clinton administration, and it's true during the Bush administration. It's bipartisan.

We have been compelled to create an armaments industry of vast proportions.

The arms business is an absolutely acceptable business.

Indeed, it is quite sad to see the United States becoming the main exporter of arms. It is quite sad to look at the U.S. government subsidizing arms exports.

Since the Gulf War, since the new World Order, America is now the number one arms dealer in the world.

Britain is one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, after the States. There's a lot of money in weapons deals. We sell weapons, and our responsibility ends as soon as they leave the country; they're unpacked, and then before you know it, they're spread around the world.

The merchants of death have provided jobs for centuries, but that's no reason to continue it.

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Grossing Out dealt with the western nations selling arms to the Third World and exploiting these countries.

I know that Britain and the United States and others ship arms in the Middle East, 10 or maybe 100 times more than the Russian does.

You wouldn’t sell me arms. I had to buy them where I could.

Armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments.

You cannot be the arsenal of democracy if you don’t have an arsenal. We must build up our manufacturing base.

The military budget is simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon to arms contractors.

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

The defense budget is more than a piggy bank for people who want to get busy beating swords into pork barrels.

The military system is, to a substantial extent, a method whereby the population provides a subsidy to the high technology industry.

The military market is based on human folly, not normal market precepts. Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists. It's depths have never been plumbed.

The French don't care where they send arms as long as they get some money.

There is only one war I am interested in making—making war against the private munitions makers the world over.

The simple rule about weapons is that if they can be built, they will be built.

Because the United States now leads the world in arms deliveries by such a wide margin, Washington has little credibility when it chides other governments for transferring weapons to U. S. enemies.

Controlling 77 percent of the global arms market yields innumerable benefits for the United States: it decreases the costs of equipping American forces, emboldens U. S. Allies to stand up to common enemies, and facilitates joint operations.