Menachem Begin Quotes

Serbia must now be dealt with.

Let's be clear: Neither Secretary Powell or I opposed the notion of removing Saddam Hussein by force, but we wanted to avoid the war if we could. But if we couldn't, the notion of removing Saddam Hussein from the scene seemed eminently sensible, given that you had, what, 16 or so U.N. Security Council resolutions basically saying the same thing.

Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it... You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.

The Senate is rushing to vote on whether to declare war on Iraq without pausing to ask why. Why is war being dealt with not as a last resort but as a first resort?

You have to talk to them before you think about bombing them.

If you don't want war, then you had better be an advocate for diplomacy with muscle.

I'm not aiming for the Nobel Peace Prize!

The utterly fallacious idea at the heart of the pro-war argument is that it is the duty of the anti-war argument to provide an alternative to war. The onus is on them to explain just cause.

We advised them to do what they think proper against the war.

Intervention only works when the people concerned seem to be keen for peace.

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.

I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.

If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

While war is never anyone first choice, sometimes it is a necessary choice.

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change.

It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

I am certain that we need a solution completely separate from military intervention.

War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed.

I do not think that war is always wrong: sometimes it is necessary to stop a dictator, prevent massive human-rights abuses, or expel an invader. But I have also seen that in the modern world, civil wars are the greatest threat to humanitarian security.

Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

Reasonable, even intelligent people can, and frequently do, disagree on how best to achieve peace in the Middle East, but, peace must be the goal of our foreign policy tools, whether they be by the stick or by the carrot.

I think that war is diplomacy by other means, for sure, and there have been wars that have been fought for righteous reasons. There are wars that have had to be fought, and there will probably continue to be.