Jim Mattis Quotes

I realized early that unless you're willing to kill the innocent, you can't win.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight. But roaring Bill, who killed him, thought it right.

We were taught to kill the enemy. They were evil. We were doing something good.

I killed one man to save 100,000.

So?" Bob said. "Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved." "Bob," I said. "You can't just go around killing people." "I know. That's why you should do it." "No, no. I can't go around killing people, either.

When I appeared before the draft board examiner during World War II, he asked me if I thought I could kill. "I don't know about strangers," I replied, "but friends, certainly."

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

People ask me if I would shoot and kill people, and I don't think I would.

Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.

The Time Lords really didn't like genocide. I'm not too keen on it myself. It's the potential you're killing off. What if, one day, there was a good Dalek? What if...

Does the commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean nothing to us? Are we to interpret it as meaning 'Thou shalt not kill except on the grand scale,' or 'Thou shalt not kill except when the national leaders say to do so'?

There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don't think you do. It's just business.

He kills people. Now I'm no expert, but doesn't that make you a bad person?" Jamie glared at Nick. "You've killed a lot more people than he has. What does that make you?" "Not a person," Nick murmured, not sounding particularly interested. "Surely you remember.

I'm a crack shot and I've won medals for shooting. But I don't think I could shoot a person.

There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing, or even worse.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'

Even a believer in nonviolence has to say between two combatants which is less bad or whose cause is just.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

There are two kinds of people in this world, son. Those who save lives, and those who take lives." "And what of those who protect and defend? Those who save lives by taking lives?" "That's like trying to stop a storm by blowing harder. Ridiculous. You can't protect by killing.

...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

I never shot nobody I didnt have to.

It might or might not be right to kill, but sometimes it is necessary.

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.