John Redwood Quotes

Our national aims can be realized only by military means. The matter needs no further elaboration or interpretation.

Any idea that you can have a league for security is nuts, and all people who favor it are potential murderers… as long as man is man, there will be war and the only way to avoid trouble is to have the best army and navy, which we now have.

When all is said and done, and statesmen discuss the future of the world, the fact remains that people fight these wars.

Army: A body of men assembled to rectify the mistakes of the diplomats.

The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood.

Our country has never started a war. Our sole objective is deterrence, the strength and capability it takes to prevent war.

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years … and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home … to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard power is the only thing that works.

One of the great advances of our time is the recognition that one of the ways to prevent war is to deter it by having the will and the capacity to use force to punish the aggressor.

If we must fight, then by God we will fight. And I hope they [the Croats and Bosnians] will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well.

Anybody who has experienced war will never want to do it again unless they have to. But if we’re going to do it, we have to be damn good at it.

It is entirely clear that there is only one way in which great wars can be permanently prevented, and that is the establishment of an international government with a monopoly of serious armed force.

If you use weapons of war to bring about peace, you're going to have more war and destruction.

You have to decide in advance whether you're ready go to war. If you guys are ready to send a million troops into Ukraine and fight World War III, you're going to do it without my support because I think that's a really foolish notion.

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. To keep the peace, we and our allies must be strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that war could bring no benefit, only disaster.

The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.

All wars are sacred to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?

Humanity should question itself, once more, about the absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war.

Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

We don't like to kill our unborn; we need them to grow up and fight our wars.

The one thing I don't understand is war.

It may be that for a long time some nations will continue to fight each other, but the example of those nations who prefer arbitration to war, law courts to the battlefield, must sooner or later influence the belligerent powers and make war as unpopular as pugilism is now.

For realists, war is like surgery-a painful and dangerous activity that is sometimes necessary ... A pacifist is like a Christian Scientist who is against surgery even when the alternative is the crippling or death of the patient.

I voted against the war in Iraq. I voted against the first Gulf War. I think war is the last resort - the last option of a great military power like us. I think that we need to focus on building coalitions. Yes, ISIS must be destroyed. But it should be destroyed by a coalition of Muslim nations on the ground with the support of the United States and the other major powers in the air and in training the troops there.

Frank Capra made a series of films during World War II called 'Why We Fight' that explored America's reasons for entering the war. Today, with our troops engaged in Iraq and elsewhere for reasons far less clear, I think it's crucial to ask the questions: 'Why are we doing what we are doing? What is it doing to others? And what is it doing to us?'

Whoever has an army has power and that war decides everything.