Jesse Ventura Quotes

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

A major theme in all my books is that the CIA is not only the first line of defense but they should also be the first line of offense.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

I think you will find scientists that think like you in Germany and Britain, and you will find politicians that think like Weinberger. I think the most bellicose ruling group in the Western world at the moment is the British.

By the late '70s I had come to question the point of a great deal of what we were doing, in terms of the CIA's overall charter.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

Reasonable people can disagree about the authorities the NSA should have, when it's appropriate for the CIA to use drone strikes, and how assertive U.S. foreign policy and intelligence should be.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

The National Security Council's real role is to coordinate the various activities of the government of the United States in the furtherance of American foreign policy.

The amount of military force necessary to provide reassurance depends on how dangerous people think the world is. And that I think ultimately depends upon the kinds of government that hold sway in major countries.

The crises in North Korea, Iran, the Middle East, show how quickly things can change and how they can go wrong. We must be prepared. And right now the Army is not.

I think most Americans believe that although it's better not to use military force if you can avoid it, that the world simply doesn't provide us the luxury of giving away military force as an important tool of foreign policy.

War on terrorism defines the central preoccupation of the United States in the world today, and it does reflect in my view a rather narrow and extremist vision of foreign policy of the world's first superpower, of a great democracy, with genuinely idealistic traditions.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

American presence is, you know, the major cause of balance of power and the stability in this region.

I believe in a strong national defense. But it's my belief that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan poses a threat to national security, and we shouldn't be involved in either area.

We need a foreign policy that distinguishes America's friends from her enemies, and recognizes the true threats that we face.

I don't think, post 9/11, we're going to wait for real obvious things like Country A attacking Country B - because Country A doesn't attack Country B any more.

The United States has dealt with the Middle East and surrounding regions for many decades in the context of the Cold War.

There are a lot of things that have to be considered in National. The military aspect of it is only one of them. I'm confident that President Bush will have all of those things laid out for him before he makes the decision.

Great powers engage.

…the CIA has never carried out any action of a political nature, given any support of any nature, to any persons, potentates or movements, political or otherwise, without appropriate approval at a high potential level in our government outside the CIA.

I received a telegram from Allen Dulles in which he stated in effect that the revolution could not have succeeded but for what I did.

We shouldn't send CIA spooks to overthrow governments.

Do we really want a world in which every country feels entitled to attack any other that might someday threaten it?