Pat Paulsen Quotes

In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

I have long maintained the military budget is not a jobs bill... and will continue to support the lowest budget possible.

The Iraq war took priority over domestic disaster prevention.

The American people have no control over what the military does. We have no say in American foreign policy.

Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

In Afghanistan, there is a plan to build democracy; hundreds of thousands of troops are protecting it. There is a plan to rebuild and reconstruct there. But many thousands of Americans die from violence and poverty every year and we don't have a plan for reconstruction at home.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

Americans assume that we never go to war to sustain our wealth, because war must be understood as a moral enterprise commensurate with our being a democracy.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

You know, I wish the world well. I want Iraq to have democracy and the Haitians to have democracy. I want the people of Afghanistan to thrive. Lord knows, we spend enough money there to help them. What about people at home? Isn't that our first responsibility?

I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to fund the U.S. and other militaries.

At the present time we are keeping our military expenditures below the…minimum which would in themselves ensure national security. By doing so we are able to increase our expenditures to assist in European recovery.

There is nothing democratic about war. It’s a straight dictatorship. The use of force to attain an end desired. We the armed forces of the USA have put a government in the position to dictate the peace. We did not come over here to acquire jurisdiction over either the people or their countries. We came to give them back the right to govern themselves.

We have a military policy instead of an energy policy.

No nation, no matter how destitute, likes to be told how much military "security" to buy.

When the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.

Foreign policy debates are frequently segregated from domestic policy ones, so commentators who propose increasing the defense budget or sending more foreign aid are seldom asked to explain which domestic programs they’d cut or which taxes they’d raise, in order to find the money.

It is, of course, true that I have given priority to the settling of the problem of security and the problem of Irian Barat, although I knew that in order to do these things, almost three-quarters of our national product had to be spent.

If the government can afford luxury travel for its cabinet officials, then surely we can find the resources to invest in quality education, jobs skills training, and properly fund the State Department and foreign aid programs.

We provide an enormous amount of resources, particularly with regard to military resources, to countries all over the world. And in many cases, those countries are not compensating the American taxpayer for the commitment that we're making to their security.

One year of the world’s military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women.

I thought we were out of money!? You can't simultaneously fire teachers AND tomahawk missiles.

The time has come to make the difficult decision. Charity begins at home. We can no longer afford to rebuild Afghanistan and America. We must choose. And I choose America.

As the wealthiest country with all the blessings that we have, do we have an obligation to help the outside world? I think we do, as we have an obligation to help everyone within our own borders. The problem is that this automatically gets translated into: "What's the point of having a huge military if we can't bomb people?" That's the problem that I have. Our foreign policy is essentially our defense policy.

I oppose U.S. military intervention in Iraq. I believe that we should not send troops or engage in air strikes-our nation's military involvement needs to be over. The United States has already spent billions of dollars in Iraq while our nation has endured a crumbling infrastructure, cuts to our social programs, a lack of investment in job training and creation, and sadly, a failure to take care of our veterans. Let's focus our resources at home. Over 4000 men and women have sacrificed their lives for Iraq. That is enough.