Ralph Nader Quotes

I think of these imperial adventures like welfare programs; you start them with all good intentions, they never end, they go on forever and get more expensive as they go on.

There was a degree of interventionism in American foreign policy, the notion that we must be the superpower and we have to intervene everywhere, that I think makes no sense.

I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.

When you invade Grenada, or when you invade Panama to capture a disreputable person, or when you bomb the Bosnia area, you can always find justification for those military actions, but it's really surprising how many times in those 25 years - that's a long time - the United States has interceded, I wouldn't say most of the time militarily, but a lot of those have been military actions.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

We also can't try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That's not leadership; that's a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It's the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq - and we should have learned it by now.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

In time it will become clear to everyone that support for the policies of pre-emptive war and interventionist nation-building will have much greater significance than the removal of Saddam Hussein itself.

It's not the job of the U.S. military to do nation-building or produce democratic utopias.

It has been lately urged in a very respectable quarter that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty all over the globe, and especially over this continent - even by force, if necessary. It is a sad delusion.

In the years since 9/11, more terrorists have been created through this President's policies than were captured or killed. There weren't any terrorists in Iraq in 2003, but there are now.

It kind of scares me, the notion that we're going to be injecting ourselves into other countries' affairs when they're not posing a threat to our security. I wouldn't be telling Israel what to do.

From the very beginning, the American republic has never shrunk from foreign wars …. There has scarcely been a year since its founding that American soldiers haven’t been overseas … American foreign policy largely consists of doctrines about when and where to intervene in other people’s countries.

One party is financing both sides in this war—namely us.

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.

Both Republicans and Democrats want to use our children as cannon fodder in order to police the world.

I’d rather build highways here then try nation building in Iraq

We are caught in the Middle East in supporting the bad guys in order to get rid of the worse guys.

America is not liberal when it goes to war.

If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.

It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson's presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.

The government has decided that the same force would be employed in America as if the inhabitants were French or Spanish enemies

The mainstream of both the Republican and Democratic Parties are equally committed to militarism today.

Distinguish we must between the right of the people the world over to be free and our obligation to free them. We have a solemn [negative] duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty and property. But we have no duty to uphold their rights. Why? Because the ostensible upholding of the negative rights of the world's citizens involves compromising the negative liberties of Americans—our lives, our liberties and our livelihoods. A just government’s duty is to its own citizens first.

The government of the United States doesn't want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace, but what's happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? Palestine? What's happening? What's happened over the last hundred years in Latin America and in the world?