Dick Cheney Quotes

I beg Osama to stop warring. He is a Muslim, and Islam means peace. Nobody wins in a war... I wish I were tapped in the problem about Iraq. I knew Saddam enough that I could have talked him into surrendering. But it's too late.

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

If the United States were attacked by rockets from one of our neighboring countries, we would be a lot tougher on them than Israel has been on the Palestinians. When we were attacked, we sent an army abroad and took over Afghanistan from the Taliban.

The sad reality of war is that if you are going to be in day-to-day combat, there are going to be casualties.

In wars, serious mistakes are made.

Unless a nation's life faces peril, war is murder.

So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links.

I don’t think that Americans should die to make Iraq free. What are we going to do? Have these endless wars of altruism?

Peace has its price, but it is much less expensive than war.

Our country is being bled daily in an effort to create a democracy in a place where it never existed.

We have to go in and win this war quickly, and then be prepared to help stabilize Iraq over an indefinite period, five to ten years, at a minimum, I believe, using a large fraction of American forces. This is a major undertaking that likely would require a total of 150,000 troops and could stay above 100,000 for several years

Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution.

While everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many

Fighting a war can cost more in blood and money than any other undertaking in which nations engage.

If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant.

Soldiers will continue to die in wars that few can convincingly explain why we are fighting.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.

Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace.

Why did we go to war? Why did we pick people from South Carolina, California, and all the places in between to go to a foreign land and risk their lives and have some die? To make sure that Saddam Hussein could do no more damage to the region or us than he has already done.

War is death. If we are to engage in war, then we should have to stare it straight in the face and call it by its rightful name.

It's an important fact of life, war.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

We're not going to cure terrorism and spread peace and goodwill in the Middle East by killing innocent people, or I'm not even saying our bullets and bombs are killing them. The occupation that they don't have food. They don't have clean water. They don't have electricity. They don't have medicine. They don't have doctors.

Politics are very much like war. We may even have to use poison gas at times.