Oscar Arias Quotes

The United States is the preeminent arms pusher worldwide.

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.

I think Obama sees everything through one lens. Doing nothing in the face of the slaughter in Syria is not only shameful, it is unrealistic. This approach leaves Syria as a broken country and a breeding ground for extremists for decades.

The trading of arms is disgusting and contributes to horrors around the world.

I don't think we should be in the business of proliferating arms sales just to protect our industrial base.

Whenever I look at TV and I see the weapon I invented to defend my motherland in the hands of these bin Ladens I ask myself the same question: How did it get into their hands? …. I didn't put it in the hands of bandits and terrorists and it's not my fault that it has mushroomed uncontrollably across the globe. Can I be blamed that they consider it the most reliable weapon?

It's expensive to keep Communism alive today. I've already got a huge foreign debt staring me in the face, and I can't reduce it by exporting tomatoes or toilet paper. We should be making dollars any way we can. And we should be exporting arms any way and every way, openly and secretly, legally or by smuggling-I don't care how.

As a member and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee during the 2000s, I met with civilian and military officials in Kurdistan, Libya, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Yemen. They shared many of the same international defense priorities as the United States. We acknowledged our differences, but we worked from where we found common ground.

What Donald Trump is determined to do, as someone who has spent a lifetime looking for deals, is to see if we can have a new relationship with Russia and other countries that advances the interests of America first and the peace and security of the world.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They're usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there's the business of war.

The problem with basing weapons sales on strategic interest is that these interests tend to shift over time, while weapons are durable goods that do not evaporate as quickly as some alliances do. Once supplied, they can't be taken back. That leads to situations such as the ones we have seen in Iraq, Somalia.

The United States builds weapons presumably secretly, and then it sells them to other countries. So the whole business of secrecy is kind of a fake issue because hardly anything technological remains a secret for very long.

The war in Iraq is a serious situation. It's - it involves the worst foreign policy mistake in the history of this country. So we should take everything serious. This is - we find ourselves in a very deep hole. We need to find a way to dig out of it.

If you come from a wealthy country with open borders, unless you seriously believe you can kill, imprison or occupy all your enemies, you have to make a world with more friends and fewer enemies - with more partners and fewer terrorists.

I wish all the mean people, if you want to be mean to each other, just buy a country together and blow each other up. Then we'd have no terrorists left. Like, don't kill innocent people for no reason. It's not fair. We love everybody. We'd even like them if they said they're sorry. It's not fair that innocent people are getting hurt. It makes me sad.

I am proposing a new foreign policy focused on advancing America's core national interests - so important - promoting regional stability, and producing and easing the tensions within our very troubled world.

I talk with countries, whether it's the Arab states or in the Middle East, and they talk about how they're glad to see us fighting against Iran. I talk with different countries in reference to Syria, and we talk about how we can get the Iranian influence out. We're talking about North Korea and what we need to do and the pressure we need to put on China. They're happy that we're finally beating up on Russia for what they've done in the Ukraine.

We will not really address our foreign policy and these endless wars that show no end in sight and seem to be getting deeper and broader and more catastrophic with each passing day.

When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries is in danger.

These aren't joyous times when we have war in Iraq. These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that.

Rosalynn said, "Jimmy, if we could only get Prime Minister Begin and President Sadat up here on this mountain for a few days, I believe they might consider how they could prevent another war between their countries." That gave me the idea, and a few weeks later, I invited both men to join me for a series of private talks. In September 1978, they both came to Camp David.

War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not--I am not dreaming--it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.

I think I know now why we are occupying Iraq. In case we have to sell America and move to a smaller country.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.